Ann Luja Cvetkovich (born 1957) is a professor ofwomen's and gender studies at theUniversity of Texas at Austin and professoremeritus in the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation atCarleton University. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English at theUniversity of Texas at Austin, where she was the founding director of theLGBTQ Studies program in 2017. She has published three books:Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992);An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); andDepression: A Public Feeling (2012).[1][2]
She co-editedArticulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) withDouglas Kellner,[3] as well asPolitical Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) withJanet Staiger and Ann Reynolds.[1] Cvetkovich also co-edited a special issue ofScholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments", withAnn Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor ofGLQ withAnnamarie Jagose.[1]
A number of well-known scholars have drawn on Cvetkovich's work, includingJack Halberstam,[4][5] Heather Love,[6]Sara Ahmed,[7]Jonathan Alexander,[citation needed] and Deborah Gould.[8]
In her scholarship, Cvetkovich engages withfeminist andqueer theory,affect and feeling,archival theory,oral history, and the everyday effects oftrauma.[9][10] Herinterdisciplinary work includesdocumentary film,memoir, music and dance performance,literature, andvisual arts.[9]
Ann Cvetkovich was born to Joseph J. Cvetkovich andValerie Haig-Brown.[11] She was raised inVancouver andToronto. She moved to theUnited States in 1976 in order to attendReed College, receiving herBachelor of Arts in literature and philosophy in 1980. She then attendedCornell University, completing aMaster of Arts in 1985 and aPhD inEnglish literature in 1988.[12][13]
Cvetkovich's early work is historical, dealing withVictorian literature andmass culture, most of her work engages with more contemporary cultural texts and political issues. All of her work is shaped by her interest infeeling as both a subject and framework. In her article, "Histories of Mass Culture: From Literary to Visual Culture" (1999), Cvetkovich discusses the interconnectedness between her interests in the Victorian and the contemporary, as well as the literary and the visual:
As someone who has a first book in Victorian studies and a second on the way that primarily considers contemporary U.S. gay and lesbian culture, I worry about being perceived as having changed fields—crossing the boundaries of genre, period, and nation that define our specializations—rather than as someone who is pursuing the same questions in a range of contexts. But I would argue that my study of the politics of sensationalism, in one case, and my study of the politics of trauma, in the other, are linked by questions about the history of discourses of affect.[14]
As opposed to some other scholars incultural studies,[15] Cvetkovich does not emphasize the differences between affect, feeling, and emotion. Rather she uses both affect and feeling "in a generic sense," where affect is "a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways."[16] She favours the term feeling because it retains "the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences."[16]
Cvetkovich's work is associated with the queer feminist project Public Feelings, which was begun in 2001.[17] The Public Feelings project is interested in the relationship between the public and political as well as the private and affective, emphasizing the significance of everyday life and affective experience. One of the cells of the project is Feel Tank Chicago, which came up with the idea of "political depression," a concept Cvetkovich works with in her bookDepression: A Public Feeling (2012).[18]
Amongst other topics, Cvetkovich has analyzedAIDS films;[19]butch and femme sexualities;[20] sexuality and activism ingo-go dancing;[21]Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirFun Home: A Family Tragicomic;[22] and oral interviews withAfghan Americans in relation to theSeptember 11 attacks.[23] She has interviewed artists and photographers includingAllyson Mitchell,Sheila Pepe,Tammy Rae Carland, andZoe Leonard, as well as engaging with their works in her scholarship.[24][25][26][27]
Mixed Feelings is based on Cvetkovich'sPhD dissertation, which she completed atCornell University in 1988.[28] It grew out of Cvetkovich's "own mixed feelings about a feminist politics of affect," and argues that the effects of affect are not always liberating;[29] rather, affect can "call attention to and obscure complex social relations, and can both inspire and displace social action."[30] In looking at the figure of "the transgressive and/or suffering woman...Cvetkovich traces the construction of affect as both natural and particularly female, and as therefore potentially transgressive and requiring regulation and control."[31] While Cvetkovich interrogates the wayMarxist,feminist,Foucauldian, andpsychoanalytic theories have engaged with affect, she also draws upon these approaches in her study. Cvetkovich argumes that affect should not be viewed as natural but instead as historical.
InMixed Feelings, Cvetkovich primarily explores the politics of affect in relation toVictorian sensationalism in the 1860s and 1870s. While she focuses mostly on traditional Victoriansensation novels such asMary Elizabeth Braddon'sLady Audley's Secret,Wilkie Collins'sThe Woman in White, andEllen Wood'sEast Lynne, she also looks at works that are not typically read as Victorian sensationalism. One chapter looks atGeorge Eliot'sDaniel Deronda, where she reads Gwendolen's "dramatic interiority" in relation to the affective power of sensation novels.[32] Another readsKarl Marx'sCapital as a sensationalist narrative which sensationalizes the male worker's body rather than the figure of the middle-class woman.[33] AlthoughMixed Feelings focuses primarily on Victorian sensationalism, the book also contains discussions ofHIV/AIDS activism and the politics of affect in relation toACT UP.
InAn Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich argues for a wider view of trauma with an interest "not just in trauma survivors but in those whose experiences circulate in the vicinity of trauma and are marked by it. I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma's effects are still being felt."[34] Cvetkovich also critiques thepathologization of trauma and argues for a broader understanding of therapy. She breaks the binary "often animated in trauma studies scholarship between acting out (frequently pathologized or designated unhealthy) and working through (often viewed as psychologically positive)."[35] Cvetkovich suggests that the public cultures formed around trauma can have therapeutic effects. Collapsing the boundary between privatized emotion and the public and political, "affective life can be seen to pervade public life."[36]
The book is "an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception."[37] According to Cvetkovich, archives of trauma resemble the archives of gay and lesbian cultures. Ephemerality and memory fundamental to both, and both also challenge the concept of the archive.[38] Cvetkovich's sources include oral interviews, performances, fiction, poetry, memoirs, photographs, and films. Theoretically, she engages withfeminist,critical race,Marxist, andqueer theory.
An Archive of Feelings focuses specifically on lesbian and queer trauma. Cvetkovich explores works onbutch and femme sexualities in relation to trauma and touch, as well as the complex relationship betweenincest,lesbianism, and queerness. She analyzes performances byTribe 8 at theMichigan Womyn's Music Festival and works byMargaret Randall andDorothy Allison. Another section of Cvetkovich's book discusses trauma and queerdiaspora inFrances Negrón-Muntaner's filmBrincando el charco,Pratibha Parmar's filmKhush, andShani Mootoo's novelCereus Blooms at Night.An Archive of Feelings also discusses AIDS activism, particularly in relation to the organizationACT UP. Drawing upon oral interviews with lesbians who participated in ACT UP, as well as memoirs about caretaking during the AIDS crisis, Cvetkovich seeks to place lesbians back into the history of ACT UP during a time when the organization was "in danger of being remembered as a group of privileged gay white men without a strong political sensibility."[39]
InDepression: A Public Feeling, Cvetkovich looks at "depression as a cultural and social phenomenon rather than a medical disease."[40] She interrogates thebiological model of depression and suggests the significance of both cultural criticism and individual experience as alternative knowledges of depression. Situating her work in relation to the Public Feelings project, she links the private world of feelings to the public world of politics, associating depression withneoliberal capitalism. While Cvetkovich explores how feelings of depression "are produced by social forces," she also emphasizes the everyday affective aspects of depression.[41] Her work is influenced byEve Sedgwick's argument for a reparative critical approach.[42] Divided into two sections, the book is partmemoir and part critical essay; the goal is to produce "a cultural analysis that can adequately represent depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions not only about theory and contemporary culture but about how to live."[43]
The memoir section of the book, "The Depression Journals," focuses on the feelings of anxiety and despair surrounding important events in her academic career – finishing her dissertation, getting an academic job, and signing a contract for her first book – as well as how these feelings affected her everyday life. Although she notes her experiences with medication and therapists, she focuses more on ordinary things that helped her overcome her depression.
The critical section of the book provides analysis into some of the topics brought up in "The Depression Journals," including spirituality and religion. For Cvetkovich,acedia, understood to be an historical precursor to depression, can help provide an alternative to the medical model.[44] Cvetkovich's critical essay also explores the relationship between depression and histories ofracism andcolonialism.[45] Looking at the artistic work ofSheila Pepe andAllyson Mitchell, she views "crafting as a model for creative ways of living in a depressive culture."[46]
Depression: A Public Feeling was reviewed byElaine Showalter inThe Chronicle of Higher Education as part of her piece "Our Age of Anxiety".[47] Showalter is critical of her emphasis on depression in higher education, asking, "[H]ow does focusing on academic anxiety bring light to the discussion in general?"[47]Depression: A Public Feeling was a finalist for the25th Lambda Literary Awards.[48] The book was interpreted and performed by Dynasty Handbag as part of the "Otherwise: Queer Scholarship into Song" event.[49]Tammy Rae Carland's 2008 photographic project entitledAn Archive of Feelings takes its name from Cvetkovich's book by the same name.[25]
An Archive of Feelings is perhaps Cvetkovich's most influential work, and has been taken up in several academic fields, including sexuality studies,queer theory,American studies, andgender studies. InFeeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (2007), Heather Love describes being influenced by howAn Archive of Feelings "makes backward feelings central."[50]Mel Y. Chen also draws from "the affective politics of Ann Cvetkovich's important work on lesbian cultures of trauma" in their work on animacies.[51]Jack Halberstam has been influenced by "Cvetkovich's concept ofarchive of feelings, a term central for Halberstam."[52]
InEve Sedgwick and Adam Frank's article "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: ReadingSilvan Tomkins", they critique Cvetkovich's engagement with affect inMixed Feelings:
Perhaps most oddly for a 'theory of affect,' this one has no feelings in it. Affect is treated as a unitary category, with a unitary history and unitary politics. There is no theoretical room for any difference between being, say, amused, being disgusted, being ashamed, and being enraged. [...] Cvetkovich's implication throughout is that genres are differentiated not in relation to the kinds of affect they may evoke or generate but far more simply by the presence or absence of some reified substance called Affect.[53]
