Digital humanities talk

1. ALL THE FEELS:
WHITENESS AND AFFECT IN
DIGITAL PUBLIC DISCOURSES
Adeline Koh
@adelinekoh

3. ACADEMIC “CIVILITY”?
• Divya Nair
• Saida Grundy
• Melissa Click
• Mirelle Young

5. CIVILITY
• “toxicity”, “civility/incivility”, “unity”
• affective structure of “civility” in twitter feminism and higher
education
• affective economies (Sara Ahmed)
• objects of hate—built upon whiteness of imagined communities
• hashtag feminism and Melissa Click case

6. EMOTIONS AND POWER
• Affect and naturalizing power relations
• Not interested in “truth”, but how emotions create surfaces of
inside/outside communities

7. AFFECT STUDIES
• Larry Grossberg: affect as “a structured plane of effects that forms
part of the force relations working to govern people’s conduct.”
• Studies on affect and its influence scholarly activist communities-
rare
• Clare Hemmings: “aspects of narrative meaning otherwise
obscured”
• Jennifer Harding and E. Deirdre Pribam: “emotion relations, like
power relations are productive: they not only subordinate, they
create.”

12. AFFECT AND RACE
• “toxic”
• “endless stream of hate”
• “bashing”
• “chastisement”
• “tone policing”
• Women of Color—“toxic” figures polluting platforms

13. SARA AHMED
THE CULTURAL POLITICS OF EMOTION
• Affect does not “reside” in a single, given subject/object
• Affect produced as a result of circulation
• Marx
• M - C - M (Money > Commodity > Money)
• D - S - D (Discourse > Signs > Discourse)

14. WHITE NATIONALISM
HATE AS LOVE
The depths of Love are rooted and very
deep in a real White Nationalist’s soul
and spirit, no forms of ‘hate’ could even
begin to compare. At least not a hate
motivated by ungrounded reasoning. […]
No, it is not hate. It is Love.”
—Aryan Nations Website

15. VICTIMS TO
AGGRESSORS
CIRCULATION OF AFFECT:
“Higher love = feminism”

16. TOXIC WOMEN OF COLOR
RACE AND ETHNICITY
Goldberg: “There’s a shorthand way of talking about online feminist
arguments that pits middle-class white women against all the groups
they oppress.”
Murphy: “It’s about discouraging critical thinking, humanity, and
going straight for the jugular, while onlookers cheer on the virtual
blood bath.”
Wilde-Blavatsky: “stop bashing white women in the name of
Beyonce,” explicitly indicting Mikki Kendall for ‘white woman
bashing’; forced into following “a certain kind of left liberal ‘post-
colonial’ strain of thought” or be “accused of white imperialism”

17. Surfaces
“Bodies surface by ‘feeling’ the presence of others
as the cause of injury or as a form of intrusion” - Ahmed
faces—invisible bonds of the whiteness of feminist commun

18. WHITENESS
• Not merely in terms of skin color, but in relation to subjecthood,
agency and institutional power
• Harris: “Whiteness is not simply and solely a legal property interest.
It is simultaneously an aspect of self-identity and of personhood,
and its relation to the law of property is complex. Whiteness has
functioned as self-identity in the domain of the intrinsic; and as
property in the extrinsic public and legal realms.”
• Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

19. WHITENESS
BEYOND SKIN COLOR

20. University of Missouri

21. DARKENING WHITENESS
MELISSA CLICK
• Whiteness can be darkened when white subjects step outside the
bounds of acceptable, normative whiteness
• “threatened”, “harassed”, “inappropriate”
• “These actions against Professor Click are not about a few minutes
of her behavior caught on video. These actions are calculated to
distract and redirect the conversation away from student concerns
over campus racism, and to silence other faculty, staff and students
from lending their voices in support. […] And to create a chilling
effect against those who might publicly protest in the future

22. • Click: becomes “sticky” object of white civility
• Conservative argument: “privileged” professor who “abuses” her
students
• Erasure of whiteness of the crowd upset by the students

23. CONCLUSION
AFFECT AND WHITE NARCISSISM
• Click & Women of Color Feminists
• affective subjects of hate drawing imagined community of white civility
together
• Reversing power dynamics through representation
• power threat due to social media upsets
• “in hating another, the subject is also loving itself; hate structures the
emotional life of narcissism as a fantastic investment in the continuation
of the image of the self in the faces that make up the ‘we.
• Trump campaign