Feeling queer, queering feelings: an exploration of the transformative potential of affect

Abstract

This thesis explores the transformative potential of affect, specifically of queer affects. It presents a critical engagement with the current trajectory within affect studies, which focusses on ontological approaches to affect, and explores a different way of engaging with affect theoretically: through phenomenology. The author argues that a phenomenological approach to affect can bypass not only the epistemology/ontology debate and the conceptual mind/body separation present in much theory on affect, but that it can also show how one might work from lived experience in order to investigate what is often referred to as the 'structural'. This is done by exploring and expanding on the notion of the 'reparative practice', as coined by E. Sedgwick, which enables a phenomenological exploration of one's relation to the world through one's affective experiences. Key references in this thesis are Sara Ahmed (2006, [2004] 2014), Clare Hemmings (2006), Eve Sedgwick (2003).