Gender, affects and fiction. Presentation of the thematic dossier

Abstract

The call invited papers exploring, from different disciplinary fields and in diverse socio-historical contexts, the ways in which fictions (in written, audiovisual, performative formats, etc.) enable or obstruct ways of thinking and naming the affects involved in the process of producing gendered subjects. It was suggested to examine in such fictions how hegemonic discourses govern affects -through regulations, prohibitions, stigmatizations, modelizations- to produce normalized subjects; or else, to analyze how individuals and collectives offer resistance and dissidence to such forms of government.

In the articles that are part of this dossier, the authors analyzed fictions of mass consumption -novels, a film, a television series-, but also other types of artistic representation of more restricted circulation -photography, poetry-; all of them demonstrate the hermeneutic power of the category "affects" and the enrichment of discourse analysis when it is included in the theoretical framework. Although the fictions analyzed were produced in countries as diverse as Argentina, Mexico and England, the issues raised involve fundamental affects for the social life of every human being: love, sexuality, pain, solidarity.

The set of articles in this dossier can be divided into three major thematic axes of unquestionable social relevance. One is that of the conflictive coexistence between the "appropriate" feelings for the political militancy of the Latin American left and the affections of sex-affective intimacy; another axis is that of the emotions that serve to resist social violence; the third is that of the critical review of the various types of love that hegemonic discourses have historically established as "properly feminine affections".