Theory Workshop: ”The affective turn”

First speaker: Professor and academic director Ellen Mortensen, SKOK

The affective turn in gender theory heralds in a showdown with the post-structuralist, language-centered theories that have prevailed in gender theory in the last decade. Theorists such as Lauren Berlant  have attempted to articulate an alternative school of thought that takes into account the physical aspects of the esthetic form. Berlant applies aspects of the more politically-oriented, psychoanalytic (Lacanian) theorists such as Zizek, as well as thinkers such as Agamben to chisel out a theory of the affects that are collectively formative in the construction of normality. For Berlant the object of desire is not merely one thing, a stage, a person, but above all else, an affect or more specifically, the affects associated with the joy of committing to something, or even to the feeling of belonging.