Rachel Rys

Writing Studies 501

Professor Johnson
29 October 2015

COR #4: Writing in Your Discipline

For this reflection, I examine the first page of one of my favorite (and most conveniently located)
texts, The Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed. On the first page, Ahmed lays out the
central question that repeats throughout the text: how do emotions shape and surface individual
and collective bodies? Throughout the work, she investigates how public texts shape the
investments of their audiences through the circulation of affect. She furthermore asks how
subjectivity is shaped when people adopt or are affected by aspects of these texts.
Ahmed opens the book with a textual example, an excerpt pulled from an anti-immigration
British National Front poster. Rather than discussing the content or context of the poster, Ahmed
raises the question of how the poster attributes certain characteristics to the nation through this
text. The questions that Ahmed values are thus methodological and epistemological, emphasizing
questions of how emotions do work, rather than the particularities of their expression. These
types of questions are central in the subset of feminist research that focuses on theories of
subjectivity.
Since the field of Feminist Studies consists of scholars from such different backgrounds,
evidence is treated in incredibly different ways across the field. For scholars like Ahmed, who
have a background in critical and cultural theory, evidence is often pulled from a wide variety of
sources to illuminate or exemplify the authors central narrative. This evidence is often regarded
as a thought experiment, through which the argument or theory can be traced out by the author.
In this introductory chapter, Ahmed weaves together examples from various types of public
discourses, from posters, to quotes from scholarly works, to personal reflections. While these
analyses are quite different from one another, Ahmed consistently prioritizes moments of
interaction that help her to develop her point. By examining interaction (between a person and a
text or a person and an object or two people), Ahmed emphasizes the sociality of emotion and the
role that affect plays in producing and reproducing boundaries.

For Ahmed, these diverse materials and narratives represent examples that can be used to support
her broader argument about the cultural politics of emotion. Ahmeds central narrative and voice
seem to come first, with various examples included in order to support or contrast the main point.
On the page I have examined, the language from the British National Front poster is used as an
introductory example that allows Ahmed to demonstrate how she is deconstructing public
narratives and how her focus differs from other approaches. This example is also used to
concretize an otherwise abstract theoretical argument and raise additional questions about the
theory.
It is clear that this text exists within the discipline of Feminist Studies because of the nature of
the questioning and the centering of a critical, justice-oriented perspective. The focus on bodies,
discourses, and cultural practices is typical of a feminist or critical theory approach. The
tendency to ask opening questions rather than make objective, evidence-based claims is a feature
that is also identifiable as a feminist studies approach.
The knowledge practices of Feminist Studies seem quite applicable to the knowledge practices of
Writing Studies. In particular, both fields closely examine how texts create effects and how they
shape the investments and knowledge of their audience. If I were teaching a writing-based
course, I think that my experience doing close reading and attending to how texts are formulated
would be helpful. As Middendorf and Pace (2004) argue, however, being able to express these
closely held beliefs requires being explicit about these values and also being able to model the
process of getting at these types of questions in particular, rather than having students prioritize
questions that might be central to another discipline. The process of teaching students the ways
of doing Feminist Studies research is complicated by the fact that there is such little consensus
from the field itself about what constitutes research or how evidence should be used. I imagine
these types of epistemological convictions will become increasingly identified as scholars with
dedicated degrees in Womens/ Gender/ Feminist / Sexuality Studies begin to enter the field.