Shiloh Whitney

Fellow’s Talk: Shiloh Whitney on Affective Injustice

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2021–22 UCHI Fellow's Talk. Affective Injustice from Anger Gaslighting to Emotional Despair: Uptake and Emotional Work. Associate Professor of Philosophy, Fordham, Shiloh Whitney with a response by Anna Ziering. December 8, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209

Affective Injustice from Anger Gaslighting to Environmental Despair

Shiloh Whitney (Associate Professor, Philosophy, Fordham University)

with a response by Anna Ziering (English, UConn)

Wednesday, December 8, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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This is an Honors Event. Categories: Multiculturalism & Global Citizenship, Academic & Interdisciplinary Engagement.

Anger gaslighting is behavior that tends to make someone doubt the aptness of her anger. In this talk, I will share some results from my study of the case of anger gaslighting. In particular, I will excavate the concept of giving or refusing uptake to each other’s emotions, and explain how uptake matters for structural injustices like sexism and racism. While the anger gaslighting case is instructive and important in its own right, my goal is to convince you that “uptake injustice” is an important category of affective injustice, one that is scalable beyond the specifics of the case of anger gaslighting. I’ll invoke the cases of environmental despair and “himpathy” as proof of concept. And I’ll suggest some ways that giving and refusing uptake to each other’s emotions is an important category of emotional work.

Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Her research lies at the intersection of Feminist Philosophy, Critical Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Emotions. She is currently an external fellow at UConn’s Humanities Institute, writing a book about emotional labor and affective injustice.

Anna Ziering is an English PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she has completed graduate certificates in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her teaching and research center on intersectional feminist questions of racial and gender justice in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her writing, published in MELUS and The Black Scholar, has received the Susan Porter Benson Graduate Research Award (2020) and the Aetna Graduate Critical Writing Award (2017). This year, she is a UCHI Fellow, a PEO Public Scholar, and a recipient of the Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust Fellowship. Her work has also been recognized by the American Association of University Women.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Fellow’s Talk: Anna Ziering on Masochism as Queer Technique

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Beyond Healing: Theorizing Masochism as Queer Technique. Ph.D. Candidate English, Anna Ziering, with a response by Shiloh Whitney. November 3, 3031, 4:00pm. HBL 4-209.

Beyond Healing: Theorizing Masochism as Queer Technique

Anna Ziering (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Shiloh Whitney (Philosophy, Fordham)

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 4:00pm. Homer Babbidge Library, 4-209.

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The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

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Defined in 1886 as a “peculiar perversion of agency,” masochism is one of many pathologized sexual interests, activities, and identities that have begun to shift into the mainstream. This talk contextualizes masochism within histories of racial violence, imperialism, and sexology, and engages new cultural texts that employ these histories for purposes of healing, pleasure, comedy, and social justice. Moving from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870) to the “Feminist Sex Wars” and the Fifty Shades phenomenon, the talk traces the cultural shift from seeing masochism as a pathology or symptom to understanding it as a technique for individual healing in a neoliberal context. The talk concludes with readings of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play (2019) and Tina Horn’s SFSX (2020) for their illumination of masochism’s undertheorized potential as a queer world-building technique.

Anna Ziering is an English PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut, where she has completed graduate certificates in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her teaching and research center on intersectional feminist questions of racial and gender justice in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Her writing, published in MELUS and The Black Scholar, has received the Susan Porter Benson Graduate Research Award (2020) and the Aetna Graduate Critical Writing Award (2017). This year, she is a UCHI Fellow, a PEO Public Scholar, and a recipient of the Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust Fellowship. Her work has also been recognized by the American Association of University Women.

Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Her current research is on emotional labor and affective injustice. Her research draws on Feminist Philosophy, 20th-century French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Fanon, and Affect Theory to develop a critical phenomenology of affect and theorize uniquely affective forms of injustice. Her work can be found in journals such as Hypatia, Philosophy and Social Criticism, Chiasmi International, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Southern Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and PhaenEx. Look for her contribution in the Northwestern University Press edited collection 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology and Philosophies of the South.

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpreting, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.