Politics of Affect, Feeling and Emotion

What is the relationship between Mizrahi feminism and Israeli ultranationalism? What is the relevance of gender justice activism to the 2014 Gaza War and Israel’s foreign policy?

Wrapped in the Flag of Israel Second Edition examines neoliberal bureaucracy in the Global South using feminist critical race theories. It interrogates the relationship between the State of Israel and its Mizrahi single mothers who are at the forefront of Mizrahi feminism. It also presents a model of bureaucracy as divine cosmology that preempts the agency of disenfranchised Mizrahim who are Israel’s demographic majority. Mizrahi protests fall flat when the Israel-Palestine conflict dominates the headlines. While most studies of neoliberal bureaucracy employ a Foucauldian or Marxian lens, this book illustrates how Israeli bureaucracy draws on a theological essence that fuses religion, gender, and race into the foundations of citizenship. It sets out to understand why Mizrahi mothers remain loyal to a state that injures them though its bureaucratic system.

The extensive Afterword to the Second Edition connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War. It tracks sequences that began with social protest and ended with elections that bolstered Israel’s political right. In between came bloodletting between the IDF, the Palestinian Authority, and Israel’s neighboring Arab states. The 2014 Gaza War was a watershed, but not only in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Under the smokescreen of war, Israel accelerated neoliberal economic reform. The first victims of this restructuring were Mizrahi single mothers. Palestinians, however, would pay the highest price for Israel’s Mizrahi-Ashkenazi rift.

Der Beitrag nimmt die rechtlichen und politischen Regulierungen von Nähe-
und Fürsorgeverhältnissen in sogenannten Regenbogenfamilien zum Ausgangspunkt für die Erörterung der Frage, wie und welche familialen Lebensweisen normalisierenden Einschluss in politisch-rechtliche Regime erfahren. Indem die politische Debatte um das sogenannte Kindeswohl in Familien mit lesbisch, schwul, bisexuell und/oder trans* lebenden Eltern analysiert wird, macht d_ Autor_in deutlich, wie die Figur des »Glücks« darin zum Leitmotiv wird.

The break-up of Yugoslavia disintegrated the Yugoslav citizenship regime, and new communities of citizens and citizenship regulations were born. Since the identitarian and lived aspects of citizenship are inseparable from its formal and legal aspects, (not) having the ‘right’ personal documents and (not) being recognized as the ‘right’ kind of citizen had profound effects on the lives of many individuals. Relying on the concept of documentality and stressing the feature of documents as being constitutive of social reality, this article analyses personal narratives illustrating the lived experience of citizenship transformations after the break-up of Yugoslavia.

Excitement had always been a nodal affect for sustaining the efforts and politics of reconciliation and friendship between ‘Greeks’ and ‘Turks’. And this has been the case for almost all kinds and levels of engagement from the grass-root, civil society to government-led initiatives.
1999 marked, inded, a ground-breaking shift when the calls for a ‘Turkish-Greek friendship’, transformed suddenly from a radical message pursued by small segments of the two societies, to a popular and widely celebrated, if not ‘mainstream’ message. The numbers of Greek-Turkish initiatives at all fields of activity (from civil society to the arts, to business and politics) and the points of contact between the two societies skyrocketed during the period 1999-2003 boosting further the experience of excitement over this new cordial relationship with the once ‘enemy-other’.
However, despite this—unprecedented since the population exchange of 1923—emotions stimulated by socio-cultural and economic exchange between the two societies, wariness and boredom started appearing as a symptom in the Turkish-Greek politics of friendship. Signs of boredom could be traced amongst the disillusioned peace activists who saw their own radical vision of ‘Turkish-Greek friendship’ being used for commercial and profit-making prospects during the 2000s; but also amongst experienced pro-rapprochement practitioners who saw their years-old efforts for unbiased media reporting, or the avoidance of tensions-stimulating political rhetoric to remain stubbornly unfulfilled. After all, despite the abundance of the ‘friendship’ narrative, none of the long-standing interstate disputes were resolved with the earthquake diplomacy. Finally, there was the boredom of those who went successfully through their ‘rite-of-passage’, initially amused by the discovery of cultural similarities between Turks and Greeks, but then started feeling indifferent about it. For them, Greeks and Turks were not any more enemies or friends… they were just ‘neighbours’.
Is then boredom the price to pay for the normalization of the societal relations across the Aegean?
But then, how is it possible that almost two decades in since 1999, Turkish-Greek relations can still stir up excitement; both in positive and negative ways? From the discovery of new ‘grey zones’ in the Aegean, to the enchantment of descendants of refugee families with the search of family roots in the ‘other’ side; to the fascination of Turkish tourists with the Greek islands.
This chapter explores this pendulum between excitement and boredom in Turkish-Greek relations arguing that both emotions carry their own different potentials as part of the politics of reconciliation for overcoming of the burden of history across the Aegean.

Insbesondere im vergangenen Jahrzehnt sind vermehrt politische Initiativen aus einer und für eine trans* Community entstanden. Der vorliegende Beitrag nimmt die aktuelle politische Bewegung von Trans*Aktivist*innen, die transnational vom Globalen Norden und Westen aus agiert, in den Fokus und erörtert deren affektiven Implikationen. Er geht der Frage nach, wie die Verbindungen von Trans*Aktivist*innen zu verstehen und welche gewaltvollen, imperialen Momente darin impliziert sind. Aus einer affekt-theoretischen Perspektive untersucht der Beitrag die politische De/Mobilisierung und mögliche neuartige Formen politischer Sozialität, in der Community als eine Atmosphäre des Unbehagens statt einer idealen Form der politischen Organisation zu verstehen ist. Es geht dabei um die Frage, wie das Zugehörigkeitsgefühl zu einer Trans*Community gebrochen ist und wie daraus dekolonisierende und entprivilegierende Politiken entstehen können.

Wie verändert sich die herrschende Auffassung von Familie, wenn neuerdings auch Lesben, Schwule und Trans* vermehrt Kinder haben? Wie wird gesellschaftspolitisch debattiert, wer sich als Familie auszeichnet? In dieser ethnografischen Studie zeichnet Yv E. Nay nach, wie die Figur der ‚Regenbogenfamilie‘ als Kristallisationspunkt für die Aufweichung von Normalitätsvorstellungen von Familie dient und gleichzeitig konstitutiv mit einer Verfestigung rassistischer, kulturalisierender und nationalistischer Normen zusammenhängt. Dabei werden die Forderungen nach rechtlicher Anerkennung, das Ideal des Familienglücks und die Stilisierung einer ‚demokratischen‘ und ‚fortschrittlichen‘ Nation untersucht. Die Analysen münden in eine affekt-theoretische Reformulierung des analytischen Begriffs ‚Heteronormativität’ als eine Sehnsucht nach Normalität und in einen Vorschlag für eine Konzeption queerfeministischer Politiken affektiver Paradoxien.

The full pre-publication text of a 2015 book on feelings. Drawing on the work of Suzanne Langer, amongst other theorists, the book sets out a concept of feeling; explores its relationship with language and social relations; shows how analyses that include feeling can illuminate understandings of key topics related to health and illness (health belief; interactions in chronic fatigue; and madness). The book concludes by positioning feeling in relation to prominent critiques of the 'affective turn' in the social sciences.

On January 21, a roundtable discussion on the history and current meaning of critique took place at Spektrum in Berlin. The event was organized and moderated by Dennis Schep (Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule). Participants were:
Luce deLire (Philosophy and German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University)
Hansun Hsiung (Max-Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte)
Jule Govrin (Friedrich Schlegel Graduiertenschule)
Jan-Philipp Kruse (Rechts- und Verfassungstheorie, TU Dresden)