Description
Emotions and affect have long been a topic of interest to those studying the global circulations of reactionary, far-right and/or fascist politics and political sensibilities. Studies that focus on how political parties, organisations, institutions, and media bodies constitute and articulate these politics by mobilising emotions such as fear, anxiety, and resentment are plenty. However, there is still too little attention paid to the ways in which micro, banal and ordinary processes produce attachments to reactionary politics at the molecular level (Bratich 2022). These attachments may involve under-the-radar affective experiences that reach beyond conventional loci of research on reactionary politics and can manifest through enjoyment, humour, laughter, play, disgust, envy, amongst others. Moreover, they may circulate outside of traditional media and political realms to shape reactionary political subjectivity through everyday encounters such as digital media, pop culture, literature, food, domesticity, etc. These circulations can find their way outside bounded national sites and can produce transversal and global networks of reaction and reactionary subjectivity. We take Kathleen Stewart’s work on “ordinary affect” (2007) as our starting point to conceptualise the role of affect in shaping global reactionary politics and to interrogate the emergence of reaction beyond the institutional, the national, and that which has been labeled the “extreme”. To do so, this panel brings together papers that look at diverse cases such as the weaponisation of affect as gendered punishment in the case of Shamima Begum; the everyday attachments to the White-Hetero Patriarchy in Hallmark movies; desire and enjoyment in far-right video game modding communities; reactionary politics of vulgarity in contemporary Britain; and the satirical humour of migrant communities in Germany.
