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Chapter four, “Unwilling Feeling,” reads John D. Caputo’s material theology and his conception of the insistence of God alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on what she names “affect aliens” and willfulness to offer biblical scenes of affect alien prophets. Jonah and Martha embody such moody prophecy in this scene. The chapter constructs and applies an affect hermeneutic to and with biblical texts in order to read for what might happen when we follow moodiness to unexpected theological conclusions. Jonah’s and Martha’s moodiness in their biblical tales reveal not what’s wrong with them, but rather serve as a lament against problematic theological interpretations and conscriptions of each character. These affect alien prophets exist as blockage; their existence stops up or slows down the normative flow. These biblical characters prophetically persist by remaining moody impediments to the story. To gravely attend to such prophets is to embrace alternate flows or undercurrents within the biblical story. Such an embrace invites us to look for alternate flows within our contemporary stories.

This chapter examines the appearance of Mesoamerican and biblical codices in Cherríe Moraga’s The Last Generation (1994). In Moraga’s conclusion to The Last Generation, “Codex Xerí,” the Book of Revelation appears alongside many glyphs of Chicanx revelation, be they written on barrio walls or present in bodies gathering together. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on orientations, disorientations, and homing devices as a conversation partner for Moraga’s prose and poetry, this chapter argues that scriptures serve as homing devices while they simultaneously function as disorientation devices, where scriptural disorientations can offer both tragic and transformative potentialities, especially for queer Chicanx subjects. Scriptures, and the revelatory power attributed to them, both bind and displace queer Chicanxs even while they can be usable in disorientations that open up other worlds of being.

For modernists like Djuna Barnes, objects mark, but also frequently mobilize, the very conflict that exists between the characters who are depersonalized by their sense of racial, cultural, class, and gender difference, but who also desperately seek some magical reconnection with the prelapsarian—be it through their relationships and object-attachments or through their nomadic positionality. This chapter explores Barnes’s use of objects not only as the markers of the impersonal, but also as affective spaces upon which the characters various desires and socio-political, ethical, gender, and racial conflicts are projected and (re)negotiated. Although the essay’s focus is primarily on Barnes’s Nightwood, her novel is also discussed in relation to her early work, as well as her last and frequently underestimated play, The Antiphon. Drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed, the essay examines the ways in which Barnes deploys objects as “affective economies of difference” that mobilize the characters’ sense of displacement while simultaneously providing a temporary respite from its very realities.

Utilizing Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, this chapter examine how Alison Bechdel’s work mobilizes representational regimes to orient, disorient, and reorient the reader toward a politics of location. Interweaving comics and cartography, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? demonstrate how comics may be used to construct alternate maps for queer and feminist-oriented landscapes of the self. These works do not merely write the self, they locate the self, as a form of autotopography. The rhetorical power of comics as a visual medium is vested in the possibility for juxtaposing different representations of space within the same space of representation. Including maps in panels or as structuring elements of panels, Bechdel’s comics contextualize the map as but one representational apparatus, itself predicated upon numerous constituent techniques (such as gridding, perspective, toponyms, scale, etc.).

In the wake of Michel Foucault’s arguments concerning the emergence of “homosexuality,” it has become customary to declare the expression “sexual orientation” more or less irrelevant to any period before modernity. Taking off from Sara Ahmed’s recent effort to filter the issue of sexual orientation through the lens of phenomenology, this chapter considers the extent to which the concept of sodomy in the Middle Ages might justifiably be viewed in these terms. The chapter also returns to issues raised elsewhere in the book concerning the relevance of the sodomy paradigm to depictions of female homoeroticism. Two case studies are considered. First, the chapter focuses on female recluses such as Christina of Markyate, whose religious identities are represented as traveling along a “straight” path to God. In certain texts designed for anchorites, however, the language of sodomy is intermittently evoked as the obverse to this chaste and otherworldly orientation. Second, the chapter turns to visual depictions of male sodomites in hell, who in some paintings are even shown being punished by acts of anal penetration. These images arguably convey the sin identities of sodomites in ways that orient them sexually as well as spiritually.

This chapter accounts for a consistent feminist pedagogy across Woolf’s fiction, from The Voyage Out (1915) to Between the Acts (1941). Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life (2017) and Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2018), this chapter demonstrates a consistent attention in Woolf’s novels to the lessons girls and women must learn in order to survive their patriarchal world: the accommodations (or lack thereof) that the world makes available to them (financially, spatially, institutionally); the misogyny that structures the access boys and men expect to have to the attentions of girls and women as well as the system of punishments and rewards that polices the availability of these attentions; and the sources of love and independence that allow Woolf’s fictional characters to imagine feminist lives and worlds. The chapter carefully situates this account of Woolf’s feminist pedagogy with and against the rich tradition of feminist scholarship on Woolf.

This chapter opens by establishing women's centrality to the religious life of the household and community, and, in particular, their work as model converts and proselytisers. It argues that women’s devotion was neither inherently private nor inherently concerned with questions of selfhood or personal transformation. Drawing on the Queer Phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, the chapter suggests the extent to which conversion functions as a re-orientation and change in direction. The second half of the chapter takes women’s biblical needlework as a case study in material culture as an instrument of orientation. Considering a group of manuscript poems alongside the evidence of inventories and surviving stitchcraft, the authors argue for the evangelical and devotional effects of women’s decorative arts, and suggest that scriptural and religious themes were not simply emblematic but intended to work upon and transform the viewer. For early modern readers and viewers, the needle was a doubly efficacious tool, able to prick not only fabric but the consciences of those who wielded it or meditated upon its products.

Cora Fox traces the ways the gendered governing emotion of merriness negotiates and solidifies communities in ‘Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor’. Her essay points to how recent work on positive emotions in contemporary affect theory, particularly informed by Sara Ahmed, can be placed in dialogue with literary accounts of emotion as framed and imagined in aesthetic forms. The central fantasy of merriness that the play constructs offers unique insights into everyday early modern sociality.

What is the meaning of the surprising origin story of the midlife crisis? Reflecting on the history of the midlife crisis in light of ongoing debates about the cost of living for women and men, the final chapter points to the relevance of female and feminist discourses about aging and the life-course. Feminist conceptions of “midlife crisis” continue to exist, although the term is rarely used. The idea of changing your life midway through is central in the work of theorist Sara Ahmed, and middle age also remains prominent in the debate about gender and careers, where a new “midlife crisis at 30” describes women’s anxiety about integrating work and family lives. However, as Sheila Heti points out, time and aging often liberate from the strain of making a decision and can bring relief for women who are faced with the choice of motherhood. By illuminating critical attitudes and alternative conceptions of the meaning of life, the story of the midlife crisis makes visible the legacy of feminist thought and practice. This makes it important to better comprehend who suppressed it and how, while also encouraging a fuller engagement with feminist pasts as a starting point for new visions today.

In ‘Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry’, Leila Watkins explores pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s late seventeenth-century devotional poetry, which display a near obsession with the process of finding present happiness in the material world. The essay addresses Traherne’s poetry’s surprising affective resonances by way of Sara Ahmed’s definition of positive affects as ‘orientations’ toward objects we believe are likely to cause happiness Watkins thus argues that Traherne views poetry as a tool that can help readers obtain happiness by modifying their inherited cultural orientations toward specific objects.

Chapter three begins with a discussion of the (disputed) decline of activism within the community sector in favour of more ‘gloves on’ approaches which work inside institutions for change. This story of decline often hinges on neoliberalism, told as either a tale of submission or resistance to neoliberal ideology. To explore how else community organisations work for social change, this chapter focuses on the connection between emotion and alternative organising. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, emotion is understood as part of ‘world-making’ and as a possible way to increase institutional responsibility for victims of violence or inequality.

This chapter expands the analysis of Chapter 2, turning to The White Peacock (1911), The Rainbow (1915), and Women in Love (1920) to redress an oversight in Lawrence’s reception: the absence of a queer Lawrence. The chapter reads three respective relationships in these novels as instances of what Sedgwick calls “queer tutelage,” a pedagogical relationship associated with care, protection, love, and deviation from reproductive and familial logics and norms. Though Lawrence’s characters never sustain their queer attachments or loves, these three exciting and painfully brief experiments demonstrate Lawrence’s careful narrative attention to sexual and processual (re)orientations that model three different problematics: sustaining an erotic friendship and mutual guardianship into adulthood; affirming a love that seems resistant to general models or norms; and maintaining a resilient resistance to the normal and an awareness of the pernicious / generative links among shame, sex, education, and the future.

This chapter outlines a second key context for the resurgence of interest in empathy: the rapid growth of interest in human rights discourses in the early twenty-first century. The first section, ‘Cultivating empathy’, reviews key claims made by human-rights scholars concerning the empathy-building qualities of fiction, before outlining the critical response to such claims and introducing Edith Stein’s phenomenological model of empathy as a promising framework. The second section, ‘Reading humanitarian campaigns’ reads side by side Sara Ahmed and Virginia Woolf to provide a feminist underpinning for an other-directed approach to empathy. The third section, ‘Positioning the empathetic gaze’ reads Susan Sontag alongside Pat Barker to argue that both writers are cognisant, in looking at another’s suffering, of the implication of the gaze in structures of power and privilege. The final section, ‘Empathy and the institution’, focuses on Pat Barker’s Life Class to ask where and when the scene of empathy is situated, and with what effects.

This chapter examines the work of the Holy Spirit in the transformation and sanctification of Christians. It argues that accounts of sanctification that build upon the idea of an instantaneous implantation of new moral powers in the Christian upon receipt of the Spirit have significant problems. It then turns to Augustine’s theology of delight and desire to provide an alternative theology of sanctification that is experientially and affectively more persuasive. The second half of the chapter shows that this “affective Augustinian” approach has a number of further advantages. It can account for the fact that sanctifying experience of the Spirit exhibits variability and that human beings are often a mystery to themselves; it can affirm a qualified role for practice and habituation in Christian sanctification without overestimating the transformative power of Christian practice; and it directs attention to the social as well as materially and culturally embedded dimensions of sanctification. The chapter concludes by arguing that an “affective Augustinian” vision of Christian transformation can also account effectively and compassionately for the persistence of sin in Christians.

This chapter looks at a selection of post-2000 Asian American films that feature Asian American protagonists who are 1.5 or second-generation immigrants. The Debut (dir. Gene Cajayon), Red Doors (dir. Georgia Lee), Saving Face (dir. Alice Wu), and Charlotte Sometimes (dir. Eric Byler) question the professional and financial ambitions that were hallmarks of the model minority ideal of the economically successful Asian American established in the 1960s. The films depict protagonists who find themselves unable to fulfill what Sara Ahmed calls the "happiness duty" and experience melancholia and depression. A number of these independent Asian American filmmakers explore non-heteronormative and non-conjugal ways of expressing love and passion, revealing the shifting values, transcultural affiliations and desires that are now part of the multiplicity of Asian North American identity.

This chapter describes the “personalistic bias” argument against taking characters as moral agents, and argues that although the argument identifies a real concern, to fail to see fictional characters as moral agents does more harm than good. The most salient objection against taking fictional characters as moral agents is that it distracts viewers from politics, institutions, systems, and contexts. The chapter argues that the personal is political, in that the representation of a fictional character can become a “public mythology” with significant cultural influence. Paying attention to characters as moral agents is also important because the representation of individual characters in a narrative context elicits emotions in relation to narrative paradigm scenarios, and those emotional responses have significant cultural importance.

Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror continues to dominate feminist approaches to biblical sexual violence, especially stories of extreme violence or misogyny. However, Trible’s approach, which she describes as “telling sad stories,” fails to capture what is fuzzy, messy, and icky about sexual violence. In its place, this chapter argues for “unhappy reading” that holds space for complexity and unhappiness. Building on Sara Ahmed’s work on unhappiness in The Promise of Happiness, unhappy reading concentrates on the difficulties in our reading processes, and in the stories themselves. The chapter demonstrates the difference between approaches via a close analysis of Judges 19, the rape and murder of the Levite’s concubine. While well intentioned, the “telling sad stories” approach collapses the difference between rape and murder and attempting to speak “on behalf of” the dead woman. An unhappy reading, in contrast, lingers with the unhappiness of the story, transforming the challenge it poses to feminist reading into a space of possibility.

This chapter introduces a new approach to rape and sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, asserting that sexual violence and rape are frequently fuzzy, messy, and icky. Fuzzy identifies the ambiguity and confusion that often surround experiences of sexual violence. Messy describes the consequences of rape, while also describing messy sex and bodies. Icky points out the ways that sexual violence fails to fit into neat patterns of evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Taking seriously these features of sexual violence, the chapter also proposes four new interpretive tactics: refusing to claim a position of innocence (drawing on Donna Haraway’s work), resisting paranoid reading positions (borrowing from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), tracing sticky affect (adapted from Sara Ahmed), and reading through literature. The chapter then applies these tactics to a rape text in Nahum 3.

“Interlude” aligns Mesmer’s “crisis state” with Freud’s 1909 discussion of the interrupted lecture. Intended to explain psychoanalysis to an America audience, Freud’s analogy also informs the psychological insights Douglass engages when describing the many interruptions he experienced. Two examples—an encounter in Five Points and at a political convention in Philadelphia—show his traumatic theory in action. The public account of such exchanges generates a form of immediacy that Douglass strives to recreate in his telescoping autobiographical narratives. With an assist from Kaja Silverman and Sara Ahmed, “Interlude” follows two analogies in the Douglass archive where he compares people to things (a speeding train, Paganini’s violin) in a vibrant new way. Thinking of his final work as an experiment in new media thickens their archival value and reveals the intersection of media and memory that Douglass enlists to transform the impossible demands of freedom into a “willful ecology” of support.