The Uses of Our Negative Affects
Image description: A colorful mass surrounded by black and white emoticons, encircled by black and white outline drawings of six women against a pale yellow background. The emoticons depict crying, wide eyes in surprise, scrunched up faces and more. At the bottom, there is a line drawing of a woman facing up with her eyes closed, superimposed with an image of her screaming.
“How do you feel?” Throughout my experiences in therapy, this question has continuously stumped me — it also happens to be the question every therapist seems to love to start sessions with. To be completely transparent, I haven’t always answered this question truthfully. Instead, I’ve tended to alternate between “I’m okay” or “I don’t know,” responses I’ve found to be nice and vague, yet truthful enough that I didn’t feel guilty. Even when I felt especially bad, I figured that “okay” was a justifiable response because things could always be worse, right?
Part of why I’ve tended to respond in this way is because, having started out in therapy as an angsty teen, I’ve never quite fully trusted the whole “confidentiality” spiel — I was scared my therapist would report back to my parents, reinforcing their belief that my struggles were purely personal, without recognizing the larger familial or structural issues. Part of this was also because sometimes, I really didn’t know how I felt, with one therapist suggesting that I might be feeling numb, but for me at least, this was rarely the case.
Most of the time, though, I just didn’t see the point in delving deeper. “I’m okay” was my attempt at shutting the door to that conversation — the one that would start with “Why are you feeling angry/frustrated” (because this was how I frequently felt). Often, it would end with me spilling unresolved childhood wounds, wounds rooted in racism and misogyny (though I wasn’t cognizant of it at the time), wounds that spiraled into self-hate, insecurity, and all the so-called symptoms that reinforced the idea that my struggles were due to personal failings. These sessions almost always ended with me breaking down in tears of frustration because these grievances were from the past and out of my control. I’d leave the session in a state of heightened frustration, irritation, and/or anger because the therapist had excavated old wounds yet offered no real solution except for self-care strategies like deep breathing or grounding exercises that rarely did anything for me.
The truth is, my struggles were shaped by larger social structures that deeply hurt me. Yet, therapy ignored this more comprehensive picture, treating me instead as a broken, maladjusted subject who overreacted to “minor” instances of discrimination (I wasn’t hate-crimed after all, was I?) and needed to learn the “correct” coping mechanisms. This is the problem with Western models of psychotherapy: they posit feelings and emotions as unique to the individual, overemphasizing boundaries while ignoring the broader social structures that shape the negative affects (the feelings and emotions we are not conscious of) of minoritized subjects. This approach often leaves us feeling unfulfilled, leading to heightened frustration.
But what if our negative feelings, emotions, and affects aren’t merely obstacles to be managed through self-care? After all, as minoritized subjects, we face discrimination daily, be it overt or subtle. These experiences accumulate, shaping our interactions with negative affects and the frequency with which we encounter them. And because they are structurally rooted, we simply cannot “deep breathe” our way out of them, not permanently, anyway. Rather than viewing these emotions as disruptions to be appeased through self-care, affect theory has opened my eyes to their powerful potentiality, demonstrating how our emotions, so often framed as highly personal and individual, are, in fact, profoundly political.
Reframing Trauma
In today’s sociocultural context, we often understand trauma in terms of catastrophic, out-of-the-ordinary events. For example, we might imagine a war veteran or a rape survivor experiencing PTSD. While these are very legitimate experiences, trauma also exists in less visible forms.
In the chapter “The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma” of her book An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich challenges individualist models of clinical psychology that treat trauma as exceptionalized events stemming from the dramatic and catastrophic. Instead, she introduces the idea of “insidious” or “everyday” forms of trauma, attending to the harm that stems from the accumulation of “minor” but persistent experiences, particularly those rooted in systemic oppression. One way to understand this idea is through the concept of microaggressions: subtle slights or comments that may seem insignificant in isolation but, over time, have a compounding and painful effect. Growing up, I remember feeling uncomfortable when peers mocked my Asian facial features or made eye-pulling gestures, but I brushed them off, not wanting to seem overly sensitive. However, the prevalence of such “trivial” exchanges subconsciously instilled a growing self-hatred. By reframing our understanding of trauma in ways that move beyond medicalized frameworks like PTSD, Cvetkovich argues that acknowledging everyday trauma diffuses both its origins and cures, highlighting the need to transform broader social systems rather than simply treat individual symptoms.
To be a marginalized individual in a society that is hostile towards minoritized identities means to be assailed daily by events that contribute to negative affects, making us disproportionately vulnerable to everyday trauma. However, because of the way our society individualizes emotions and medicalizes trauma, typically understanding it as arising from discrete, catastrophic events, everyday traumas are often not considered legitimate forms of trauma. As a result, our emotional responses are framed as isolated personal issues, rather than being recognized as inextricably tied to broader systemic problems.
Action-Oriented Feelings
In “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Audre Lorde illustrates her experience with one kind of “everyday trauma,” recounting several encounters with anti-Black racism as a Black woman in academia, particularly in relation to white feminists. She explains that her response to racism in feminist spaces is anger, a reaction she sees as appropriate and necessary for meaningful change. Lorde characterizes anger as carrying valuable insight and energy, arguing that it only becomes destructive when it is unarticulated and suppressed. Rather than avoiding the tensions and discomforts that arise between white and BIPOC feminists, she insists that articulating the anger that emerges leads to clarity, countering the conflicts that inhibit change, and allowing for coalition and collective action against the forces that hate and seek to destroy all minoritized subjects. In this way, Lorde frames anger as holding productive potentiality and being oriented toward actionable change by clarifying the tensions that arise between white and BIPOC feminists.
Though implicit in Lorde’s articulation of the “uses of anger” is the idea that anger is mediated and expressed collectively between women, in the chapter “Containing Anger, Advocating Anger: Freud and Feminism” of her book Statistical Panic, Kathleen Woodward explicitly articulates the powerful collective potentiality of anger. She explains how American academic feminists of the 1970s and 1980s understood anger as a group-oriented emotion — something that can both emerge from and mobilize a group toward actionable change. Unlike Freud, who largely saw anger as repressed within the individual, a feminist perspective insists that anger can emerge as a socially produced emotion, and can even be experienced retrospectively within that collective setting. For example, Woodward reflects on the anger that she felt in hindsight when her ex-husband made a one-sided decision to move their family across the country. She explains that, though she later realized that she should have been angry, what she felt at the time was confusion. This demonstrates the power that lies in analyzing seemingly individualized emotions in the collective setting, which allows us to identify the structures we should direct our anger towards.
The power the collective wields in identifying and articulating anger becomes especially concrete in the feminist practice of consciousness-raising, spaces where women gather to discuss and analyze their “personal” issues to gain a better understanding of oppressive societal structures. In her essay “We Stayed Up All Night Rapping,” Lazz Kinnamon traces the rich history of feminist consciousness-raising during second-wave feminism, challenging the common misconception that it was a liberal, reformist project. This mischaracterization, she explains, is partly due to the prominence of the National Organization of Women (NOW), which co-opted and popularized consciousness-raising on a national scale. This brought the practice into the mainstream, but distanced it from its more radical origins. Kinnamon highlights that feminist consciousness-raising was first developed by the Women’s Liberationists as an intentional practice for analyzing how the “feminized terrain of feeling” could facilitate radical social change. These women encouraged small groups to share and reflect on their emotions, which often revealed that the feelings they had believed were exclusive to their own experience were actually shared by others, enabling them to connect these individual experiences of negative affects to larger systems of oppression. In this way, Kinnamon illustrates how collectively experienced emotions like anger, when recognized and connected to underlying structural issues, can be transformed into collective political action.
Feelings that Lie “Beside”
While negative emotions can be oriented toward action, it is equally important to recognize that sometimes, “everyday traumas” can leave us feeling immobile, stuck, trapped, or perhaps even paralyzed. Everyday traumas are not extreme or catastrophic, but their “everyday” nature makes them insidious. Like microaggressions, they slip into our daily lives as small, seemingly trivial moments that, on their own, might not feel like a big deal. However, over time, they pile up in quiet, heavy ways, wearing us down until we’re left feeling exhausted, unseen, and hopeless. Resisting the capitalistic tendency to constantly make everything action-oriented or productivity-driven, I want to attend to the feelings that lie “beside” — to use Eve Sedgwick’s terminology — highlighting the power that lies in acknowledging them.
In the introduction to her book Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick introduces the idea of the “beside” as a non-dualistic alternative to thinking about what is “beneath,” “behind,” or “beyond.” Unlike thinking in terms of “beneath” or “beyond,” which moves away from the present and leads us to think in a hierarchical or linear manner, she insists on attending to the “beside,” which, with its “irreducibly spatial positionality,” allows for us to really focus on the present space and time (Sedgwick 6). Sedgwick explains that the “beside” is not dependent on a fantasy of egalitarian or peaceful relationships, a point she illustrates by giving an example of siblings sharing a bed. This example shows the informative possibilities of the seemingly passive and unassuming posture of the beside. While siblings sharing a bed are literally beside each other, their relationship is rarely equal nor peaceful; instead, one might picture the differences between siblings being amplified when they are lying beside each other, or the tensions that may arise from being in such close proximity, such as fighting over bed space or possession of the blanket. In this way, Sedgwick challenges the assumption that “besideness” is correlated with equality and peace, showing how the power of the “beside” actually lies in its ability to illuminate inequalities, differences, and tensions.
In her book Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai attends to what she calls “ugly feelings,” which can be thought of as feelings that lie in the “beside.” Unlike “grand,” “ennobling,” and “morally beatific” feelings like anger, fear, sympathy, melancholia, and shame, she explains that ugly feelings are “minor,” “generally unprestigious,” and lack moral value or catharsis — they do not offer a purifying, satisfying release of intense emotions. Instead, ugly feelings like irritation, anxiety, envy, and paranoia are characterized by a “flatness or ongoingness,” making them “weaker and nastier” (Ngai 6).
However, Ngai insists that the power of ugly feelings lies in their powerlessness, giving them a diagnostic power. For example, she explains that envy illuminates societal inequality. Yet, she points out that this diagnostic quality of envy isn’t immediately apparent to us because it is an emotion that has historically been feminized and proletarianized, shaping how it is perceived by society. Women and the working class are often seen as more “emotional” and less rational, leading to their envy being dismissed as signs of personal inadequacy rather than a legitimate response to inequality. By unraveling the historical marginalization of feelings like envy that affect our understanding of the emotion, Ngai demonstrates how closely examining ugly feelings illuminates their diagnostic power, allowing us to see them as symptomatic of structural inequalities rather than signs of personal failings.
Like Ngai’s “ugly feelings,” Hil Malatino’s articulation of “side affects” in his book Side Affects can also be thought of as the feelings, emotions, and affects that lie in the “beside” (again, using Sedgwick’s terminology). Like Cvetkovick, Malatino focuses on the everyday, insidious forms of trauma that often go unrecognized because they fall outside societal understanding of “real” trauma as dramatic and extreme. In particular, Malatino insists that there is a “trans specificity” to certain negative affects, which cannot be reduced to binary terms like dysphoria and euphoria that our culture typically associates transition with. Transgender narratives are often flattened into extremes — either celebratory visibility or tragic suffering — leaving little room for more complex or ordinary emotional realities. Like Sedgwick and Ngai, Malatino calls attention to affects that are less ambitious, weaker in nature. For example, he explains how trans individuals are made to desensitize themselves against constant transantagonism and gendered misrecognition by numbing themselves, retreating socially, emotionally withdrawing, and dissociating as a way to survive in a world hostile toward trans identities. By attending to side affects, Malatino shows how such seemingly “minor” emotional responses allow for survival in a society that is hostile toward marginalized individuals, particularly in a transphobic world.
For me, affect theory has reframed my understanding of trauma and negative affects. It has shown me that my negative feelings are not personal failings to be quietly managed through individualized therapy alone. Before, when I was faced with microaggressions, I attempted to dismiss the feelings of discomfort or hurt that arose, believing that I was overreacting. However, by attending to the structural roots of these negative feelings and recognizing their powerful roles as action-oriented, diagnostic, and survival mechanisms, affect theory sheds a new light on the phrase “the personal is political.” Through this framework, I have learned how integral feminism and feminist theory are to healing, because they connect my personal pain to collective struggles, helping me understand that I am not alone, and that by acknowledging and acting on our shared experiences, we can find collective healing and create meaningful social change.
