Elizabeth Wilson

Neural Geographies draws together recent feminist and deconstructive theories, early Freudian neurology and contemporary connectionist theories of cognition. In this original work, Elizabeth A. Wilson explores the convergence between Derrida, Freud and recent cognitive theory to pursue two important issues: the nature of cognition and neurology, and the politics of feminist and critical interventions into contemporary scientific psychology. This book seeks to reorient the usual presumptions of critical studies of the sciences by addressing the divisions between the static and the changeable; the natural and the political; the neuro-cognitive and the cultural that have been traditional to both scientific and critical accounts of neurology and cognition.

This paper makes an argument for greater consideration of negativity in queer engagements with biological or natural systems. Focusing on one particular paper by Karen Barad – “Nature’s Queer Performativity ” – I argue that this work tends to under-read the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be. What interests me is that Barad’s argument about nature’s queer performativity begins and ends with sodomy. While it has been a highly cathected site of analysis for some early and influential work in queer theory, sodomy has been little discussed in feminist and queer science studies where Barad’s work has been so influential. I argue that sodomy spoils any identitarian queer politics that attempt to depathologize or reaffirm the natural world.

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm, and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn.

Ruth Leys raises a number of important questions about the conceptual and empirical underpinnings of the affect theories that have emerged in the critical humanities, sciences, and social sciences in the last decade. There are a variety of frameworks for thinking about what constitutes the affective realm , and there are different preferences for how such frameworks could be deployed. We would like to engage with just one part of that debate: the contributions of Silvan Tomkins's affect theory. We take issue with Leys's formulation that Tomkins's work along with that of Brian Massumi, William Connolly, and Paul Ekman form a group of like-minded theorists. We do not believe this represents an accurate account of the conceptual and empirical commitments of these various authors. By bundling their work together, Leys misses much of what is compellingly critical in each of these writers, and she overlooks what is most invigorating in the debates amongst them. In addition, the specificities of Tomkins's work have been badly served in Leys's essay. In four volumes stretching from 1962 to 1992 Tomkins laid out a complex and captivating theory of the human affect system, in which mechanisms of neurological feedback, social scripts, and facial behavior coassemble as affective events. Our response to Leys's essay is motivated by a wish to see more detailed engagements with this theory—the distinctiveness of which we believe has yet to be fully explored in this new affective turn

In this book, one of the most accomplished and thoughtful cultural commentators of the day, considers the contradictory nature of cultural relations. Elizabeth Wilson explores these themes through an examination of fashion, feminism, consumer culture, representation and postmodernism. Debates within feminism on the nature and effects of pornography are used to illustrate a particular kind of cultural contradiction. Wilson recognizes that postmodernism permitted the reappropriation of subjects that were not previously considered worthy of attention, or opposed to the idea of emancipation, chief among these was fashion. She shows that the association of an interest in this culturally significant subject with a revisionist project raises doubt.

The rise of a bohemian subculture in the early 19th century drew on the Romantic beliefs in genius on the one hand and erotic passion on the other. Romantic love was a tragic, often forbidden passion and thus could include the most transgressive form: homosexuality. In the German bohemias of Munich and Berlin at the turn of the century, however, the influence of psychoanalysis as a radical new theory of human desire influenced the `erotic revolution' of the period; this moved bohemian love from an understanding of desire as a fatal passion to a celebration of it as a liberating and ecstatic force, albeit with sometimes disastrous consequences. The migration of psychoanalysis to the American bohemia of Greenwich Village inaugurated a further change as popularized versions of Freudian theory advocated the importance of sexual fulfilment in life, yet also became normative and prescriptive. The ironic conclusion drawn is that `bohemian love' has become the norm in a consumer society, yet shorn of its subversive and transgressive elements.