{"product_id":"against-affect-paperback-softback-9781496242303","title":"Against Affect (Paperback \/ softback) 9781496242303","description":"\u003cfont face=\"Georgia\"\u003e\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"6\"\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/font\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"4\"\u003eLisa Downing (Author)\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e9781496242303\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003ePaperback \/ softback, published 1 April 2026\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e164 pages\u003cbr\u003e20.3 x 12.7 x 1.5 cm, 0.666 kg\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cem\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"For progressives, a moment of truth arrives when their battles against old dogmas merely prove to entrench new ones. In \u003ci\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/i\u003e Lisa Downing . . . throws down the gauntlet to everyone active in the humanities and social sciences today.\"—Eric Heinze, author of \u003ci\u003eThe Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"This is a timely and deeply important book in which Lisa Downing offers up a concerted intellectual assault on affect theory—and the broader cultural turn to emotion—that should make even the most trenchant of advocates pay attention. This is not mere attack or deconstruction, however, but instead a clear and precise argument for the return of rationality, grounded in a feminist neo-enlightenment, to academia and Western culture more widely. \u003ci\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/i\u003e is not a book that can or should be ignored by anyone interested in navigating a route through present cultural challenges that is progressive but also grounded in reason.\"—Darren Langdridge, author of \u003ci\u003eSexual Citizenship and Social Change: A Dialectical Approach to Narratives of Tradition and Critique\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\"An indispensable critique of the contemporary epistemic and affective terrain. Its proposal for a redistribution of reason is a crucial path out of this terrain. . . . The boldness of the diagnostic and critical dimensions of this argument leave the book with few peers.\"—Anna Kornbluh, author of \u003ci\u003eImmediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp align=\"justify\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/i\u003e interrogates shibboleths of feeling and reason and their relationship with ideas of identity, gender, and freedom in the twenty-first century. Lisa Downing starts with the familiar premise that emotion has been historically gendered and racialized since the Enlightenment, with women, people of color, and other non-normative subjects associated with emotionality, and only white men with logic and reason. The \"affective turn\" in the academic humanities attempted to redress this injustice in the 1990s, and affect theory, ubiquitous today, revalorized precisely what was excluded from logos: the bodily, the emotive, and the experiential. But how effective has this strategy truly been in changing perceptions of marginalized forms of knowledge and subjectivity? \u003ci\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/i\u003e argues that the academic affective turn has prompted a broader cultural one, marked by increasing prioritization—and exploitation—of feeling over reason, issuing from both the political left and right.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUsing a series of case studies, \u003ci\u003eAgainst Affect\u003c\/i\u003e explores how the deployment of a language of emotion in both the academic and cultural spheres constitutes a new normativity. In thinking against affect, Downing questions the efficacy and desirability of idealizing feeling and proposes instead the redistribution of reason.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cfont size=\"3\"\u003eAcknowledgements\u003cbr\u003e Provocations\u003cbr\u003e Introduction\u003cbr\u003e 1. Repairing What Wasn’\u003cbr\u003et Broken: Queer Theory’\u003cbr\u003es Affective Turn\u003cbr\u003e 2. Why Aren’\u003cbr\u003et We Minding Our Own Shoes? On Empathy\u003cbr\u003e 3. Words as Weapons: The Tyranny of Vulnerability\u003cbr\u003e 4. If Reason Went Viral: Rethinking Vulnerability in Covid-19 Culture \u003cbr\u003e Conclusion: For a Feminist Neo-Enlightenment\u003cbr\u003e Notes\u003c\/font\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\u003c\/font\u003e","brand":"University of Nebraska Press","offers":[{"title":"Brand New","offer_id":52653261750552,"sku":"9781496242303","price":15.85,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"url":"https:\/\/freshlyprintedbooks.co.uk\/products\/against-affect-paperback-softback-9781496242303","provider":"Freshly Printed Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}