Nebraska University Press will publish Lisa’s monograph-manifesto, Against Affect, in their ‘Provocations’ series on 1 April 2026.
Pre-order here.
Description:
Against Affect 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 nonnormative 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? Against Affect 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.
Using a series of case studies, Against Affect 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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Provocations
Introduction
1. Repairing What Wasn’t Broken: Queer Theory’s Affective Turn
2. Why Aren’t We Minding Our Own Shoes? On Empathy
3. Words as Weapons: The Tyranny of Vulnerability
4. If Reason Went Viral: Rethinking Vulnerability in Covid-19 Culture
Conclusion: For a Feminist Neo-Enlightenment
Notes
Pre-publication praise for Against Affect:
“For progressives, a moment of truth arrives when their battles against old dogmas merely prove to entrench new ones. In Against Affect Lisa Downing . . . throws down the gauntlet to everyone active in the humanities and social sciences today.”—Eric Heinze, author of The Most Human Right: Why Free Speech Is Everything
“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. Against Affect 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 Sexual Citizenship and Social Change: A Dialectical Approach to Narratives of Tradition and Critique
“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 Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism