Footnote 6Ĭentral to my contribution will be Berlant’s argument in her article in this issue about the significance of “flattened affect” in a “cluster of queer and independent docudramatic narratives emerging in the mid-1980s and continuing into the present” (Berlant 2015: this issue). Connecting modes of textual and political affectivity, Berlant reads particular aesthetic moods and embodied atmospheres as indicative of the genealogies of “the times we’re in” (Wiegman 2014). Footnote 5 In order to track the significance of the cultural within shifting globalised social landscapes, she argues, we need to establish the historical textures of its generic conventionalities. Footnote 3 Simultaneously “paranoid” and “reparative”, to cite Eve Sedgwick’s ( 1997) famous diagnosis of critical reading tendencies, Footnote 4 Berlant’s approach insists that, if we are to engage with the political, we must grasp the continuing affective work of its sentimentalising forms and our complicity in mobilising them in our own feminist (and other critical) practices. Of particular significance for scholars across the humanities and social sciences concerned with capitalism’s reorganisation of contemporary cultural politics is Berlant’s focus on our investments and attachments to social practices which militate against “our own thriving” and thwart our attempts to achieve the “good life” they seemed to promise. It is in this context that we might consider femininity as a generic category whose history binds together popular culture and everyday social life in ways that have a continuing political significance. In the cinema, narratives of desirability and/or pathos have marked our relationship to this figure as a site of ambivalence. It is the figure of the woman who has come to stand as the sign of both suffering and fulfilment within these genres. Bound by the generic histories of melodrama and romance, for example, conventionalised femininities have become legible through a repertoire of emotional intensities articulated through familial, domestic and sexual relations. With the emergence of mass culture in North America and elsewhere, modes of sentimentality have taken particular commodified forms, shaping new styles of what Berlant names “intimate publics”. Reading these shifting genres as historical and political formations, Berlant tracks the ways in which their current charge builds upon (as it also reinvents) previous affective conventionalities that have organised the social categories we inhabit. For Berlant, the cinema has always been integral to the ways in which modern culture has produced affective subjects who inhabit its social and political spaces through fantasy landscapes, the mise-en-scène of which structure our everyday lives as much as they do the fictions we consume. When Lauren Berlant writes about contemporary genres of intimate sociality, she extends a concept of structural repetition from film theory into a more generalised understanding of subjectivity as inextricable from the popular modes of its formation. Closing with a discussion of “offgender” flux, the article considers Swinton’s recent twinning with David Bowie to open up how her performances reinvent affective genres while calling forth their histories and temporalities. ![]() In tracing the history of Swinton’s gender fluctuations, this article concludes by reflecting on some of the failures of feminist and queer language to articulate the nuances of affective registers androgyne, butch, tomboy, trans, and genderqueer designate styles of gendered and sexual embodiment, but these do not extend satisfactorily to aesthetic moods and atmospheres. Famous for embodying gender ambiguity since her performance as Orlando, Swinton’s association with androgyny as a pre-queer promise of limitlessness folds femininity back upon its historical conventions and imperatives. ![]() My reading of Swinton’s capacity for flatness places it within the history of her unusual facility to cross between independent and more popular cultural forms and to set femininity as genre in motion as she does so. As a contribution to this special issue on Berlant’s work, my article traces Swinton’s styles of flat affect as an aesthetic relationality across a number of films, including Teknolust, Michael Clayton, The Deep End, and Orlando. One enduring element in her repertoire, however, can be brought into focus through Lauren Berlant’s concept of “flat affect.” Typically described as mysterious, otherworldly, or ethereal, Swinton often brings to her screen and live performances a quality or atmosphere that contradicts the conventional expectations of feminine emotional expressiveness and legibility in popular cinema. Tilda Swinton is hard to classify as a performer because flux and mutability have become her signature qualities.
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