Department of Feminist Studies

This module aims to provide an overview of some of the historical approaches to the relationship between affect, emotion and work, and to bring those to bear upon the contemporary politics of work under different contexts of precarity. Specifically, it examines the relation between work and affect under present conditions of post-Fordism and of the neoliberal organization of production, time, and subjectivity. Using cinematic texts as primary references, the goals of this module are to point to bothcapital's exploitation of affect, but also capital's production of affect, as these intersect with the concerns of gender and precarity.

The following two sections provide two approaches for thinking about how forces of capital both exploit and produce affect. Each section provides different resources for thinking about how exploitation and affects can yield new subjectivities and different forms of sociality. These subjectivities and sociality do not necessarily reproduce capital, and can in fact yield forms of resistance. After discussing some of the relevant theoretical issues, each section then suggests ways that these can be understood through readings of films.

This module aims, first, at showing that precarity is not a recent symptom of a crisis of late capitalism (to be potentially solved), but a long-term structural element of the modern capitalist system, securing its survival at the expense of various “disposable populations,” and, second, to point to strategies of resistance to this process of precarization, in particular those strategies that produce translocal and transdisciplinary coalitions.

This module aims, first, at showing that precarity is not a recent symptom of a crisis of late capitalism (to be potentially solved), but a long-term structural element of the modern capitalist system, securing its survival at the expense of various “disposable populations,” and, second, to point to strategies of resistance to this process of precarization, in particular those strategies that produce translocal and transdisciplinary coalitions.

becoming undisciplined is a zine that speaks from/to what it means, feels, and looks like to be Black in relation to the university. The zine includes essays, poetry, art, and photography from fifteen black graduate students and artists. 

Contributors include: Aliyah Abu-Hazeem, Alex Cunningham, Camille Dantzler, Taylor M. Jackson, Ciarra Jones, Timnit Kefela, Y. Norris,  Joshua Reason, Josalynn Smith, Tiffany Smith, megan spencer, Amoni Thompson-Jones, J. Victorian, Mariah Webber, and Lauren Williams.

becoming undisciplined is a zine about what it means, feels, and looks like to be Black in relation to the university. We seek submissions in a variety of genres and formats that convey the breadth of ways that knowledge production happens in and outside of the university. We are interested in the complexities, contradictions, tensions, and pleasures that shape Black scholars’ relationships to academia.