How do affects compare? Comparison clarifies the particularities of a thing by testing it against similarity and difference. The comparison of different reactions to a portrait of Trump reveals a structure of feeling white. Rigorous comparisons of affect also elucidate power. A politics of feeling comes into sharp relief when we compare the love that orients bodies to an imagined white nation (Ahmed 2004) with the religious masculinities that orient others to governance and violence (Khoja-Moolji 2021). Rigorous comparisons denaturalize power relations and debunk identitarian assumptions; they link contexts, bodies, and practices which are considered distinct; and they tether and untether as political acts. There is untapped potential in the comparison of affects-–a potential that traces back through the conceptual foundations of affect theory and brings us to its emergent future.
Just as it can clarify power relations, comparison can also entrench and occlude power asymmetries. Conversely, examinations of difference—especially through postcoloniality, decoloniality, and antiracism—may intervene in pernicious comparisons. Theorizations of affect already examine the differential relations that restructure space, time, knowledge, sovereignty, boundary, belonging, animacy, feeling and unfeeling, affectability, and imaginaries (Ahmed 2004; Chen 2012; Holland 2012; Palmer 2017; Yao 2021). These can take the form of anti-Black racism (Holland 2012), Islamophobia (Schaefer 2022), and gendered national imaginaries (Elias 2018; Khoja-Moolji 2021), to name a few.
Comparison was at the heart of the affective turn, a critical mass of work on affect that emerged in the 1990s and early 2000s. Its innovativeness was stimulated by the comparison of two different approaches to affects: singular affect differentiated by intensity (Deleuze 1991; Massumi 2002) and plural affects differentiated by quality (Sedgwick and Frank 1995). They activated a research paradigm that made it possible to think about power as a material, embodied force. Scholars continue to develop their conceptual and methodological applications. They figure out the benefits and drawbacks of each approach in a range of situations. These comparisons reverberate through past and present innovations in affect theory. The goal of this workshop is to amplify the potential of comparison to develop new, more incisive ways to analyze power.
Workshop presentations should attend to power and comparison. We care about the details—the local textures of a feeling, the physiological signs of an emotion, or the discernible spikes of an intensity—and how they entrench and/or dissolve power. We invite submissions to this workshop to consider:
Project format: We are open to whatever presentation format best interrogates the comparison of affects and can be completed in fifteen minutes. This might be a more traditional research summary with a slidedeck or a narrative walk-through of your problem and/or intervention. Whatever gets us where you’d like us to go and exhibits your analytic rigor.
Project submissions: Please submit a 250-word project abstract–which should discuss your method and its relation to comparison—via this Google Form: bit.ly/comparing_affects. The submission deadline is December 9, 2022. The workshop is planned as a virtual event to take place on March 18, 2023. Questions and other inquiries can be sent to comparing.affects@gmail.com.