Reading Lauren Berlant: Feminist Affect Theory [4-weeks, $150 Suggested]
Instructor: Stillman | Tuesday August 10-31 | 8:00-9:30 PM ET
Lauren Berlant has been called the most significant feminist theorist of their generation. Where others challenged the justice of normativity, Berlant explored why it is we form the passionate attachments we do to the norms that make our worlds. They showed us that even as normativity might crush us, it creates us as the very subjects it crushes, providing us with stability as well as suffering, to say nothing of pleasure, politics, or crushes of our own. Berlant developed accounts of the affective structures of politics, citizenship, and labor that have since become indispensable to any clear-eyed critique of gender or capital. They taught us to understand the genres of our politics, they explained how the fetus replaced society at the center of government policy, and they produced conceptions of sex in public that lay bare the inescapable struggle to create a public we can inhabit. Perhaps they are most well-known for a theory of “cruel optimism” that reveals how the very things that are killing us are so often our reason for getting out of bed in the morning. Lauren Berlant died this summer, and to celebrate their incomparable contributions to feminist theory, Marxist critique, and radical pedagogy, Night School is offering a four-week seminar on some of their most significant ideas. Join one of Berlant’s former graduate students for an introduction to a thinker whose work changed the world and whose signs at protests so often read: “Depressed? It might be political!”
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