Who Are Our Close Ones? On Responsiveness and Affective Action

Presentation of a research project as part of the "Jeudis de la Maison Suger", a residents' research seminar.

In this session, Ianina Moretti Basso will reflect on the affective dynamics of responsiveness through a feminist queer theoretical framework. She will examine the intersections of proximity, emotion, and action, and explore the normative conditions that shape our capacity to respond to others.

Presentation of the project

"This presentation is part of the research project "Towards a Feminist Queer Responsiveness: On the Affective Action of Bodies in Conditions of Proximity." A feminist queer analysis offers a productive lens for examining the processes through which politics become emotionalized. The concept of "responsiveness"—situated between response and responsibility—provides a framework to revisit the ethical, affective, and epistemological ties that shape our capacity to respond. This capacity is not spontaneous but emerges from specific conditions of intelligibility. Why, then, do we respond affectively in some situations, and why do some events elicit no response at all? Normative structures shape our ability to feel certain affects and respond from within them. Affective action may involve reconfiguring the affective order: by emphasizing the radical contingency of any emotional configuration, action emerges as a means of contesting subordination. Whom do we feel close to? To whom do we respond emotionally? How do archival collections that shape our memories contribute to these conditions of responsiveness? A research residency at the LGBTQ+ Archives Center in Paris offers the opportunity to engage with collections that concretely interrogate these questions of emotional economies and affective responsiveness."

Speaker

Ianina Moretti Basso is a teacher and researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities (FFyH) of the National University of Córdoba (Argentina). She holds a PhD in philosophy with a thesis titled "Bodies and Alliances: A Study on the Performative Possibilities of Agency in the Face of Normative Violence." She coordinated the Gender and Sexualities Training Unit at the FFyH of UNC and teaches at the Faculties of Social Sciences and Philosophy and Humanities at UNC, as well as in the Master's program in Gender and Rights at General Sarmiento University (Buenos Aires). She is currently leading the research project "Leather Materialisms: A Laboratory of Feminist Thoughts" and is the principal investigator of the project "Erotic Justice: A Leather Critique of the Sex-Affective Grammars of Our Time," funded by the National University of Córdoba.