The subject of true feeling: pain, privacy, and politics

All of Us Are Vulnerable, But Some Are More Vulnerable than Others: The Political Ambiguity of Vulnerability Studies, an Ambivalent Critique

“…66 In this way, the thoughtful work on vulnerability risks becoming another manifestation of what Lauren Berlant characterized as "trauma's seduction of politics," whereby the dynamics of dominance and inequality shift towards questions of feeling. 67 Reflecting on the case of Black Lives Matter also suggests that the project of vulnerability studies constitutes an effort to address the epistemological ignorance of the privileged, theorizing vulnerability predominantly from their point of view. It remains unclear what benefit the acceptance of constitutive vulnerability offers the disadvantaged.…”

“…See also, Sean Coyle, "Vulnerability and the Liberal Order," in Vulnerability: Reflections on a New Ethical Foundation for Law and Politics, ed. M. A. Fineman and A. Grear, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013),[61][62][63][64][65][66][67][68][69][70][71][72][73][74][75], who worries that Fineman places too much faith in the state; and Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights, 36-7, who suggests that the vulnerability heuristic works better when addressing socioeconomic rights than civil-political ones.…”

White innocence in the Black Mediterranean: hospitality and the erasure of history

“…She describes this as a form of sentimental politics that operates by burning the pain of excluded others "into the conscience of classically privileged [...] subjects" in order to make them "feel the pain […] as their pain". 70 Berlant argues that this focus on the wounds, pain, and suffering of others works to turn political problems into an affective matter to be solved through proper feeling, equating structural change with feeling good. Sentimentality, she argues, must therefore be understood as a political project launched on behalf of the beneficiaries of social injustice, as a "defensive response by people who identify with privilege yet fear they will be exposed as immoral by their tacit sanction of a particular structural violence that benefits them".…”

In the shade of the chinar

“…Th is article will evaluate the ongoing reconstruction of Dushanbe from the perspective of the aff ective registers it has elicited, from the despair of those who fondly remember its earlier Soviet oblique to those who have benefi tted from the expansion of housing stock and green space across the city center. By counterposing these positions and exploring the role of statist conceptions of modernity, personal and political memories of space and the emotions called forth by urban redevelopment, the article will elaborate on the place of aff ect and sentimental politics (Berlant 1999) in the processes of city beautifi cation and development. While the desperation shown by those mourning the old Soviet city of Dushanbe may not have been able to stem the tide of construction, this article shows it was able to produce through its emotional cascade a change in the economic and social order of construction, one that brought together developers and poorer segments of the populace in a relatively fairer, if stringently marketized, redistribution of housing.…”