Ann Cvetkovich

In Mixed Feelings, Cvetkovich primarily explores the politics of affect in relation to Victorian sensationalism in the 1860s and 1870s.

While she focuses mostly on traditional Victorian sensation novels such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and Ellen Wood's East Lynne, she also looks at works that are not typically read as Victorian sensationalism.

One chapter looks at George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, where she reads Gwendolen's “dramatic interiority” in relation to the affective power of sensation novels.

Another reads Karl Marx's Capital as a sensationalist narrative; while most of the works Cvetkovich studies sensationalize the figure of the middle-class woman, Capital sensationalizes the male worker's body.

Although Mixed Feelings focuses primarily on Victorian sensationalism, the book also contains discussions of AIDS activism and the politics of affect in relation to ACT UP.

Ann Luja Cvetkovich (born 1957) is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation (formerly the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women's and Gender Studies) at Carleton University in Ottawa.

She moved to the U.S. in 1976 in order to attend Reed College, receiving her B.A. in English and Philosophy in 1980.

She then attended Cornell University, completing her Ph.D in English Literature in 1988.

Cvetkovich's scholarship is wide-ranging and interdisciplinary.

While some of her early work is historical, dealing with Victorian literature and mass culture, most of her work engages with more contemporary cultural texts and political issues.

All of her work, though, is shaped by her interest in feeling as both a subject of exploration and framework for analysis.

Mixed Feelings is based on Cvetkovich's PhD dissertation, which she completed at Cornell University in 1988.

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; rather, affect can “call attention to and obscure complex social relations, and can both inspire and displace social action.” Thus, Cvetkovich's study is a nuanced exploration of affect and politics.

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.” While Cvetkovich interrogates the way Marxist, feminist, Foucauldian, and psychoanalytic theories have engaged with affect, she also draws upon these approaches in her study.

Important to Cvetkovich's argument is the idea that affect should not be viewed as natural, but instead as historical.

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); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012).

She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds.

Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini.

She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.

Cvetkovich's scholarship has been widely influential within academic circles.

A number of well-known scholars have drawn on her work, including Jack Halberstam, Heather Love, Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Alexander, and Deborah Gould.

In her scholarship, Cvetkovich engages with feminist and queer theory, affect and feeling, theories of the archive, and oral history.

She has also argued for the significance of looking at the everyday effects of trauma.

Her interdisciplinary work explores a wide range of cultural and artistic forms, including documentary film, memoirs, music and dance performances, literature, and visual art.

Ann Cvetkovich was born to Joseph J. Cvetkovich and Valerie Haig-Brown, who were married at the time.

Ann grew up in Canada, being raised in Vancouver and Toronto.

In her article, “Histories of Mass Culture: From Literary to Visual Culture” (1999), Cvetkovich expresses her concern about her seemingly unrelated interests – her engagement with both the Victorian and the contemporary, as well as both the literary and the visual – and discusses the way they are interconnected:

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.

While many scholars in cultural studies draw distinctions between affect, feeling, and emotion, Cvetkovich does not emphasize the differences between these categories.

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.” She favours the term feeling, though, because it retains “the ambiguity between feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experiences."

Cvetkovich's work is associated with the Public Feelings project, which was begun in 2001.

It is not only a feminist project, but also a queer project, though “it is not always announced as such.” The Public Feelings project is interested in the relationship between the public and political and the private and affective.

It emphasizes 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 substantially in her book Depression: A Public Feeling (2012).

Scholars aside from Cvetkovich whose work is associated with the Public Feelings project include Lauren Berlant, José Esteban Muñoz, Deborah Gould, Rebecca Zorach, Kathleen Stewart, Lisa Duggan, Mary Patten, Janet Staiger, and Ann Reynolds.

Cvetkovich's scholarship engages with various genres and artistic media and is often collaborative.

Amongst other topics, she has analyzed and discussed AIDS documentaries and films; butch and femme sexualities and emotions; go-go dancing in relation to sexuality and activism; Alison Bechdel's graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic; and oral interviews with Afghan Americans in relation to 9/11.

She has also interviewed artists and photographers such as Allyson Mitchell, Sheila Pepe, Tammy Rae Carland, and Zoe Leonard, engaging with their visual works in her scholarship.

Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017.