The Politics of Affective Transformation: Challenging Structural Oppression and the Sense of Sovereignty

Abstract:Evidence of structural oppression is everywhere. Despite this, many well-meaning people remain complacent in the face of these enduring wrongs. While activists and academics often hope that more and better information (e.g., statistical representations of injustice, personal narratives of suffering, well-reasoned moral appeals) will provoke action to challenge oppression, I consider a different possibility: that complacency is a necessary survival strategy for individuals whose self-understanding reflects the ideal of the sovereign subject. In this paper, I argue that maintaining a sense of sovereignty requires learning to feel—and not feel—many things and that these structures of (un) feeling regard appeals to address oppression as personal impositions. I suggest that movements aiming to challenge oppression may therefore benefit from developing a politics of affective transformation that opens us up to feeling ourselves and our structural conditions differently.