Bluetooth Orgasms

Bluetooth-operated sex toys penetrate and are penetrated by the human body, leaving code behind. This article analyzes the relationships that develop between bodies and Bluetooth-operated interactive sex toys. Resembling the pods and portals of David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ, interactive sex toys allow us to consider how technologies relate intimately to the sexual body. I use Massumi’s work on virtuality and affect theory as a starting point from which to frame embodiment, virtuality, and the circulation of affects. Further, I consider the importance of embodiment and the translations of intensities and vibrations through digital coding among the open sexual body, the technology of the sexual machine, and the applications that foster those connections, in the context of Bluetooth-operated sex toys. This article advocates the need to consider intimate encounters between interactive sex toys and bodies as complex technological and biological assemblages, where vibrating machines and the human body’s flesh come into intimate connection through datafication.

A Traveller Who Laughs

Chapter 2 discusses Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) by Isabella Bird, focusing on textual manifestations of intimacy between Bird and Japanese people, particularly her interpreter-guide Ito. Drawing on theoretical discussions in feminist anthropology and affect theory, it reveals the complexity of the politics between the traveller and hosts as well as Bird’s fluid identity and exceptional openness towards the alterity of Japanese culture. It also carries out a textual analysis of Itō no koi (Itō’s Romance) (2005), a retelling of Bird’s journey from Ito’s perspective by the twenty-first-century Japanese writer Nakajima Kyōko. It argues that Nakajima’s rewriting accords Bird and her contemporary Japanese women literary afterlife through their intergenerational female friendship. It also presents a thorough critique of the traditional androcentric paradigm of survival and friendship. It thus indicates the exciting possibility of travel writing in the field of world literature.

Rhetoric and Critical Affect Theory

Critical affect theory continues to hold promise for rhetorical theory and criticism. This article revisits the so-called affective turn in rhetoric and addresses subsequent critiques of the idea of a turn. Accounting for scholarship published since 2010, this article then groups critical affect work into six subareas of research in rhetorical studies: feminist, queer, trans, and crip affects; race and affect; Black women’s affective labor; affective publics and counterpublics; new materialism, materiality, and affect; and affective economics. This article outlines affective methodologies in rhetorical studies and highlights the affective dimensions of “theories of the flesh” in rhetorical inquiry. It ends by considering what is critical about affect theory in rhetoric.

Szaleństwo i literatura. O Dziennikach Stefana Żeromskiego w perspektywie afektywnej

Using the tools offered by affect theory, this article aims to present the theme of madness, its numerous incarnations and transformations in the text of the diaries that Stefan Żeromski left behind. Madness is depicted here as a phenomenon defying any kind of unambiguity; it can be anything from a secret of nature to be deciphered, through a creative frenzy of inspiration, to a state of apathy, sometimes interwoven with sudden ecstasy, triggered by the chronic hunger that Żeromski suffered as a young man, in other words: during his diarist period.

Affect Theory and Breast Cancer Memoirs: Rescripting Fears of Death and Dying in the Anthropocene

Re-evaluating dominant cultural narratives around dying and death is central to new critiques of individualism and human exceptionalism. As conceptual tools for theorizing the end of the individual proliferate, the affective dimensions of this project are often overlooked, especially as they pertain to individual subjects. In contrast, a significant number of iconic queer and feminist thinkers have suffered breast cancer and written memoirs representing the subjective experience of confronting mortality. This article identifies the affective orientations towards one’s own mortality as missing from queer and feminist thinking on embodiment in the Anthropocene. As a remedy, the article reads several iconic feminist breast cancer memoirs – Sontag, Lorde, Sedgwick, Jain and Boyer – for their complex representations of affect, in particular fear, in relation to dying and death. Using the affect theory of Silvan Tomkins, this analysis contributes to critiques of cancer culture in medical humanities and of mortality and embodiment in feminist environmental humanities.

Toward a Foucauldian Literary Criticism

The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault's early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault's early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness.

Postfeminist Versions of Equality? An Analysis of Relationship and Sex Counseling Practices in Finland

Relationship and sex counseling are pivotal components of the “therapeutization of society,” which has been identified and widely examined as a key transformation of 21st-century modern Western societies. The particular understandings of gender and sexuality that circulate in those practices contribute to the wider everyday conceptions of intimate life and are thus important to investigate from a feminist perspective. Combining insights from studies on therapeutic cultures, research on intimate relationships, scholarship on postfeminism, and affect theory, this article taps into the often ambivalent ways in which gender equality and sexual rights are articulated in relationship and sex counseling practices. My data are derived from an ethnographic investigation of relationship enhancement events in Finland. Equality was widely supported at these events, but there was no consensus regarding what desirable equality actually looked like. My analysis identifies several contradictory patterns in the data. First, there are statements to the effect that equality has “gone too far.” Second, many experts express tokenized critiques yet remain invested in depoliticizing views. Third, there are acts of resistance that embrace diversity and expand everyday understandings of gender and sexuality. I argue that these patterns constitute a postfeminist sensibility, thus complicating the belief that Nordic countries are exceptionally supportive of equality.