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Affect 
Susanna Paasonen 
 
 
Affect has been something of a buzzword in cultural and social inquiry since the early 2000s. 
In studies of gender, media, and communication, affect has allowed for examinations of 
public sentiment, the appeal of media images, texts, and sounds, as well as the entanglement 
of human and nonhuman bodies. While affect has arguably been present in considerations of 
the pleasure and impact of media in fields as diverse as feminist studies of popular culture, 
psychoanalytical film theory, and studies of media effects, the so-called affective turn has 
shifted attention away from processes of representation and subjectivation to questions of 
materiality, sensation, and intensity in processes of mediation. 
 
The emergence of affect as a topic of increased academic inquiry coincides with current 
debates over fake news, clickbait journalism, viral social media protest campaigns, and the 
affective manipulation of Facebook users. In foregrounding affectations, the force of 
sensation, and the volatility of feeling in networked exchanges, these developments point to 
the shortcomings of the Habermasian public sphere of critical rational exchange that fails to 
explain much of them. In studies of media and communication, affect has been applied in 
examining the intensities of sensation fueling engagements with online discussion threads, 
platforms, apps, and devices; the attraction of reality television making use of affective forms 
of address, such as melodramatic templates of confrontation and reveal, as well as cinematic 
events as ones involving both the immediacy of sensation and processes of sense making. In 
these analyses, gender becomes framed as embodied capacities and encounters intersecting 
with the axes of race, age, and social class that produce relations of proximity and distance 
toward other bodies, whether these are human, nonhuman, or representational ones. In what 
follows, the entry briefly outlines the overall rationale of the turn to affect and examines some 
of its key stakes. 
 
In its diverse applications spanning from phenomenology to neuroscience, feminist inquiry, 
science and technology studies, and beyond, affect has been deployed in questioning the 
Cartesian and structuralist legacies of cultural theory, and in providing alternatives to them 
(Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, pp. 6–8). In a new materialist framework, affect theory has been a 
means to challenge the perceived overemphasis on questions of signification, as brought forth 
by the “linguistic turn” of the 1960s. These have been seen to constrain analytical attention to 
issues of ideology, subjectivation, meaning, and representation, as well as to reproduce the 
dominance of language as a framework for understanding the world and studying it. Rather 
than examining media images, sounds, human bodies, or material objects as texts to be read or 
otherwise decoded, advocates of the affective turn have turned their attention to the intensities 
emerging in encounters with media that move bodies from one state to another, and possibly 
transform them in the process. Such encounters are not necessarily for the human subjects to 
control, and their immediacy may circumvent processes cognition and reflection. In analyzing 
these, scholars have drawn on different, partly conflicting conceptual frameworks. While 
some foreground the dynamics of power connected to gender, those resistant to the centrality 
of the human subject as scholarly focus remain disinterested in considerations of embodied 
differences and categories of identity. 
 
Affect inquiry drawing on the work of psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins foregrounds affect as 
material, inbuilt capacities particular to human bodies. Here, affect is seen as positive, 
negative, or neutral impulses and intensities that animate bodies and attune their mutual 
relations with a particular charge. Tomkins’s work on shame has been particularly influential 
in queer scholarship and it has also been brought together with new materialist understandings 
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of affect. Tomkins’ affect theory has some affinity with Spinoza’s anti-Cartesian examination 
of emotional and bodily states of affecting and being affected that may increase or diminish, 
affirm or undermine one’s life forces. Spinoza’s interest in how bodies are modified through, 
and affected by their encounters with other bodies has been key to Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix 
Guattari’s philosophy, as well as to new materialism that frames affect as non-subjective, 
impersonal potentiality, and a force that cuts across networks of human and nonhuman actors. 
 
If human and nonhuman bodies are seen as distinct in their quickness and slowness, 
movement and tempo (Deleuze, 1988, 125, 127), affect is that which animates and moves 
them. New materialist studies of affect are aligned with posthuman theory in their resistance 
to the human-centrism of academic inquiry. In paying attention to nonhuman fields of impact, 
they have been critiqued for downplaying—and to a degree effacing—feminist, queer, and 
postcolonial analyses of power and ideology, the particularity of different bodies, as well as 
the strategic ways in which affect is channeled across media toward political and economical 
ends (Hemmings, 2005; Tyler, 2008). In other words, theorizations focusing on affect as an 
impersonal life-force have been seen as resistant to considerations of the affective politics of 
media culture and the social relations of power in which they operate. At the same time, 
Deleuze and Guattari’s theorizations of affect have been applied in examining a range of 
encounters with media, from the formation of body images to cinematic experiences and 
sexualized cyberbullying targeting, and giving shape to gendered, classed, and racialized 
bodies and their respectively different spaces for moving and operating in (Kofoed & 
Ringrose, 2012). 
 
Affect can be conceptualized as intensity of sensation, or a resonant connection, which 
affords emotions with their force and quality. Understood in this vein, affect, as precognitive, 
impersonal force, and emotion, as subjective interpretations of sensory states, are factually 
inseparable. Following this line of thought, feminist scholars have conceptualized affect as a 
resource and a strategy of engagement that is activated and oriented toward specific political 
goals and outcomes in media culture (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Hemmings, 2005). Examinations of 
online hate, for example, involve the particularity of the bodies under attack, inasmuch as 
they do the speeds and rhythms of networked communication, the specificities of information 
architecture, and the logics of sharing. Online hate sticks differently to bodies differently 
marked in terms of gender, age, ethnicity, religion, ability, or body shape (Sundén & 
Paasonen, 2018). 
 
Here, affect operates less of a pre-subjective force than a contextually laden physical intensity 
that presses on people, moves them, and organizes their mutual relations. The viral expansion 
of the #MeToo campaign since October 2017 similarly speaks to the point of conceptualizing 
affect as social fuel emerging in networked encounters that has the potential to give rise to 
contingent affective publics of political engagement, in this instance as one emerging from 
experiences of sexual harassment and mundane sexism experienced by women (Papacharissi, 
2014). In the case of #MeToo, the viscerally and personally felt resonates with, and is 
amplified by, shared articulations of sentiment in ways that bridge the anecdotal and the 
structural. The viral circulation and massive accumulation of personal stories within #MeToo 
speaks of the force of affect in social organization and practices of resistance. 
 
Moving beyond the question of whether affect is something best considered as personal, 
impersonal, or both, it is evident that affective economies lie at the heart of media culture, 
from shivers of interest evoked by celebrity gossip to those involved in novel Tinder matches, 
Netflix suggestions, favorite radio shows, breaking news, or live television spectacles such as 
Eurovision, royal weddings, and super bowls. In addition to shaping ways of relating to media 
images, affective intensities can be seen as shaping ways of being in the world more broadly. 
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In her analysis of media images of fat, Katariina Kyrölä (2014) examines them as a corporeal 
pedagogy of sorts that trains people’s ways of perceiving their own embodiment in gendered 
terms. Reaching beyond studies of representation—namely analyses of how fat bodies are 
depicted in the media—this perspective allows for a consideration of relating to and 
experiencing media images and their visceral force. 
 
As people watch television shows through streaming media services, tweet in response to live 
broadcasts, and browse online newspapers, online platforms relying on targeted advertising 
are increasingly central to all kinds of media consumption. It then follows that affective media 
economies have grown inseparable from the monetization of user data as it is constantly 
tracked, archived, analyzed, and sold. In the context of user data, gender emerges as a central 
classification that is combined with both variables such as age or location and a range of 
considerably more granular specifications. User actions and motions create affective value for 
the people involved while simultaneously generating rich data archives on consumer and 
lifestyle preferences, travels and visits, values and beliefs for the platform to own, repurpose, 
and monetize. Affect then takes on the role of glue in generating stickiness that makes people 
pay attention, share the content, and repeatedly return back to the site in question. These 
developments have been examined through theorizations of affective and immaterial labor. 
 
While affording means of analyzing the contemporary landscape of networked connectivity, 
affect can equally be deployed in examining the historical layers of media culture from 
Hollywood cinema to tabloid publishing, televised sports events, and fanzine production. It 
remains central not to frame affect as a scholarly concern particular to the current scholarly 
context. Rather, expanding the framework of affect to extant scholarship helps to make 
evident the degree to which considerations of affective intensities and attachments are long-
standing concerns in studies of gender and media. Studies of fandom, for example, can be 
seen as having long engaged with affective attachments that play out between fans and stars 
of different genders (Stacey, 1994). 
 
In its focus on encounters that move bodies from one state to another and affect their 
capacities of acting in the world, the notion of affect helps in conceptualizing the intensities 
that encounters with media entail. Frictions between different theorizations of affect remain, 
and they need to be accounted for when working with the concept. Despite these frictions, 
theorizations of affect are united by an interest in materiality and intensity while accounting 
for both human and nonhuman bodies. The framework of affect makes it possible to consider 
gender as particular relations and qualities that emerge, oscillate, and alter as bodies become 
animated and differently positioned in their encounters with the world, rather than as a pre-
established category or a mode of being. Understood in this vein, a focus on affect does not 
necessitate a turn away from questions of meaning or social power in studies of gender and 
the media. Rather, it entails a shift in perceptual focus where the somatic and the semiotic, the 
material and the textual, affect and representation, matter and meaning are seen as entwined 
and inseparable from one another. 
 
 
References 
 
Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University 
Press. 
Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy (R. Hurley, Trans.). San Francisco, CA: 
City Lights Books. 
Hemmings, C. (2005). Invoking affect: Cultural theory and the ontological turn. Cultural 
Studies, 19, 548–567. 
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Kofoed, J., & Ringrose, J. (2012). Travelling and sticky affects: Exploring teens and 
sexualized cyberbullying through a Butlerian-Deleuzian-Guattarian lens. Discourse: 
Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 33, 5–20. 
Kyrölä, K. (2014). The weight of images: Affect, body image and fat in the media. London, 
UK: Routledge. 
Papacharissi, Z. (2014). Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford, UK: 
Oxford University Press. 
Seigworth, G. J., & Gregg, M. (2010). An inventory of shimmers. In M. Gregg & G. J. 
Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 1–28). Durham, NC: Duke University 
Press. 
Stacey, J. (1994). Star gazing: Hollywood cinema and female spectatorship. London, UK: 
Routledge. 
Sundén, J., & Paasonen, S. (2018). Shameless hags and tolerance whores: Feminist resistance 
and the affective circuits of online hate. Feminist Media Studies, 18, 643–656. 
Tyler, I. (2008). Methodological fatigue and the politics of the affective turn. Feminist Media 
Studies, 8, 85–90. 
 
Further Reading 
 
Hillis, K., Paasonen, S., & Petit, M. (Eds.). (2015). Networked affect. Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press. 
Sampson, T., Maddison, S., & Ellis, D. (Eds.). (2018). Affect and social media. Lanham, MD: 
Rowman & Littlefield. Tomkins, S. (2008). Affect imaginary consciousness: The 
complete edition. NewYork, NY: Springer.