all the feels: whiteness and affect in digital public discourses

ALL THE FEELS:WHITENESS AND AFFECT IN

DIGITAL PUBLIC DISCOURSES

Adeline Koh@adelinekoh

ACADEMIC “CIVILITY”?

• Divya Nair• Saida Grundy• Melissa Click

• Mirelle Young

CIVILITY

• “toxicity”, “civility/incivility”, “unity”

• affective structure of “civility” in twitter feminism and higher education

• affective economies (Sara Ahmed)

• objects of hate—built upon whiteness of imagined communities

• hashtag feminism and Melissa Click case

EMOTIONS AND POWER

• Affect and naturalizing power relations

• Not interested in “truth”, but how emotions create surfaces of inside/outside communities

AFFECT STUDIES

• Larry Grossberg: affect as “a structured plane of effects that forms part of the force relations working to govern people’s conduct.”

• Studies on affect and its influence scholarly activist communities-rare

• Clare Hemmings: “aspects of narrative meaning otherwise obscured”

• Jennifer Harding and E. Deirdre Pribam: “emotion relations, like power relations are productive: they not only subordinate, they create.”

AFFECT AND RACE

• “toxic”

• “endless stream of hate”

• “bashing”

• “chastisement”

• “tone policing”

• Women of Color—“toxic” figures polluting platforms

SARA AHMEDTHE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EMOTION

• Affect does not “reside” in a single, given subject/object

• Affect produced as a result of circulation

• Marx

• M - C - M (Money > Commodity > Money)

• D - S - D (Discourse > Signs > Discourse)

WHITE NATIONALISMHATE AS LOVE

The depths of Love are rooted and very deep in a real White

Nationalist’s soul and spirit, no forms of ‘hate’ could even begin to

compare. At least not a hate motivated by ungrounded

reasoning. […] No, it is not hate. It is Love.”

—Aryan Nations Website

VICTIMS TO AGGRESSORS

CIRCULATION OF AFFECT:

“Higher love = feminism”

TOXIC WOMEN OF COLORRACE AND ETHNICITY

Goldberg: “There’s a shorthand way of talking about online feminist arguments that pits middle-class white women against all the groups they oppress.” Murphy: “It’s about discouraging critical thinking, humanity, and going straight for the jugular, while onlookers cheer on the virtual blood bath.” Wilde-Blavatsky: “stop bashing white women in the name of Beyonce,” explicitly indicting Mikki Kendall for ‘white woman bashing’; forced into following “a certain kind of left liberal ‘post-colonial’ strain of thought” or be “accused of white imperialism”

Surfaces“Bodies surface by ‘feeling’ the presence of others

as the cause of injury or as a form of intrusion” - Ahmed

Surfaces—invisible bonds of the whiteness of feminist community

WHITENESS

• Not merely in terms of skin color, but in relation to subjecthood, agency and institutional power

• Harris: “Whiteness is not simply and solely a legal property interest. It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood, and its relation to the law of property is complex. Whiteness has functioned as self-identity in the domain of the intrinsic; and as property in the extrinsic public and legal realms.”

• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

WHITENESSBEYOND SKIN COLOR

University of Missouri

DARKENING WHITENESSMELISSA CLICK

• Whiteness can be darkened when white subjects step outside the bounds of acceptable, normative whiteness

• “threatened”, “harassed”, “inappropriate”

• “These actions against Professor Click are not about a few minutes of her behavior caught on video. These actions are calculated to distract and redirect the conversation away from student concerns over campus racism, and to silence other faculty, staff and students from lending their voices in support. […] And to create a chilling effect against those who might publicly protest in the future

• Click: becomes “sticky” object of white civility

• Conservative argument: “privileged” professor who “abuses” her students

• Erasure of whiteness of the crowd upset by the students

CONCLUSIONAFFECT AND WHITE NARCISSISM

• Click & Women of Color Feminists

• affective subjects of hate drawing imagined community of white civility together

• Reversing power dynamics through representation

• power threat due to social media upsets

• “in hating another, the subject is also loving itself; hate structures the emotional life of narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation of the image of the self in the faces that make up the ‘we.

• Trump campaign