Guiding Concepts
Ambivalence as a Feminist Project View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ava Purkiss, Emily Coccia, Catherine Sanok
Our study examines how an often dismissed affect, ambivalence, holds immense value for feminist humanistic inquiry as an analytic and an epistemological orientation toward our objects of study. Our joint paper presents ambivalence as a feminist project—one that helps us better understand the complexity of texts, people, and social circumstances by offering a conceptual category that holds space for conflicting emotions, contending historical phenomena, and intricate social dynamics. We aim to recuperate ambivalence against critiques that suggest it is merely a problem to be (re)solved—its ongoing presence read as proof of political inertia, moral enervation, or behavioral deficiency. Reconceptualizing ambivalence as an affective capacity, this paper renders ambivalence legible for feminist studies scholars across various humanities disciplines by proposing four principles: illuminating the interwoven projects of subjection and resistance, attending to complexity, embracing uncertainty, and resisting teleological narratives of progress. Our methods involve studying a range of primary and secondary feminist, queer, and anti-racist texts across several disciplines that explore, implicitly or explicitly, feelings or perceptions of ambivalence in oneself or others. Our close reading, textual analysis, and critical review of this literature enabled us to conceive of ambivalence as an emergent strand of feminist theorizing that is evolving to address affective, social, and political conditions. While mindful of the risks and limits of ambivalence, this paper encourages humanists to adopt ambivalence as an analytic in their own work, describing the specific gains to be had in “sitting with” the contradictions and discomforts ambivalence reveals.
Towards a New Foundation for Rhetoric View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Weinstein
Rhetoric is a foundational concern of the humanities. The art of rational persuasion has concerned humanists for centuries. This is particularly salient in an age where rational persuasion has taken second place to the influence of media of all sorts. That result is political polarization and embedded bias, all too familiar in political and social discourse. If we are to understand this, we must look towards a deep foundation into the construction of beliefs. This foundation, we will argue can be found in combining cognitive psychology, particularly the developing science of neuropsychology and its images of how human brains support cognition, with a biological perspective on semiotics, the idea of memes construed as the salience of symbolic communication. The paper considers the work of Antonio Damasio and Paul Thagard and Brandon Aubie whose models of the emotion, memory and belief draw upon current research into the neurological functions of the brain, combined with the revolutionary concept of Richard Dawkins’s idea of the meme as a parallel in human cultural evolution with the gene in biological evolution. Seeing memes as modifying the brains construction of memory and belief offers new insights into the role of intention and understanding in communication. The consequence for the analysis and evaluation of rhetoric is to move from the explicit content to the underlying structures that support rhetorically effective communication. Such a foundation moves the humanities towards a deeper appreciation of the role of scientific understanding of human thought and action.
