Browsing by Subject "affect"

By exploring touristic practices around particular forms of West African dance and music cultures, this study discusses how structures of global inequality are enacted on a micro-level. The study aims to understand the social relations and subjectivities embedded in them in the context of dance and music workshops for tourists in southern Senegal. A focus on dance and music allows to ask, whether these artistic endeavors provide some progressive or transformational potentials often ascribed to them, whereas the perspective of tourism enables to simultaneously consider the social and material relations of production in the context. This study is an attempt to explore the maintenance of as well as ways of challenging the inequality producing ‘social structures’ by combining postcolonial perspectives, certain ideas from ANT tradition, and theorizations of affects and emotions as productive and hence, political. This study applies an ethnographic approach. The fieldwork was conducted in southern Senegal, in December 2016 and January 2017, on touristic dance and music workshops. The research material consists of 11 thematic interviews with workshop tourists, organizers, and artists, participatory observation, background interviews and document material. The researcher’s long-term participation in the field is also reflexively considered as a source of research material and a tool for analysis. The context was understood through relations of work and dependency, yet also alternative translations and subjectivities were enabled. The context’s social relations were also informed by a desire for the Other, intensive circulation of positive affects, and reproduction of stereotypes of Africa. Disruptive affects stemming from asymmetric power structures were dealt with techniques of individualization. The research shows how the context is profoundly entangled with asymmetric and historical relations of power and inequality, and that these relations are naturalized by certain techniques of concealment. Yet, the context retains enabling possibilities as well. The study shows how affects are productive in the context, suggesting that they firmly attach subjects to problematic structures. Though the complexity and ambivalence of the maintenance of inequality producing structures is a theoretical starting point, this study points to the endurance of these problematic structures by exploring their affective extents. The study adds to a body of research on cultural tourism and shows the importance of looking outside the traditional spheres of developmental and political action in order to understand the complexities of global inequality. The study also gestures that further attention should be given to the relevance and possibilities of such concepts as affects and emotions in the field of development studies, too.

This thesis takes an affective approach to studying the meanings and mobilisations of women’s bodies in the artwork of the Woman Life Freedom movement in Iran and Kurdistan. The Woman Life Freedom (‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’ in Kurdish) movement was born following the death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini on September 16th, 2022. Amini, a 22-year-old woman, was arrested for improperly wearing her veil, and was later abused by Iranian security forces. She suffered fatal wounds which led to her eventual passing. Widespread protests erupted across Kurdistan and Iran, demanding justice for Amini, and for other women and people who have been victims of the Iranian state. The protests quickly morphed into a sustained movement, which is still ongoing at the time of writing. The movement is referred to as the JJA movement in this thesis, an acronym of ‘Jin Jiyan Azadi’. Artists have taken part in the movement by creating and sharing artwork on social media. Women’s bodies feature heavily in this artwork and are significant tools of political resistance. The research question is the following: How is the female body mobilised as a political symbol in visual art of the JJA movement? The methodology consisted of combining compositional analysis and affective analysis to study the representation of women’s bodies in thirty artworks of the JJA movement. This visual data was collected from the social media site Instagram. Multiple criteria were used to select appropriate artworks, and the chosen artworks went through many stages of manual coding on the ATLAS.ti software. A variety of Iranian, Kurdish, and diasporic literature was used to enrichen the image analysis and draw nuanced conclusions on the role of women’s bodies in the artwork. Additionally, existing scholarship on affect has been used and applied to the analysis. Throughout the project, it was seen that many artists have creatively represented women’s bodies in interaction with other bodies as well as specific symbolic objects (including national flags, landmarks, hair, fists, and blood). These visual connections were affectively decoded to draw out larger political and social meanings of the body. Based on the analysis, two main conclusions are presented. First, it is argued that women’s bodies are mobilised as political symbols of Iranian and Kurdish nationhood and transnational solidarity, and second, that they have become embodied sites of liberation, strength, dreaming and memory in the artwork of the JJA movement. This thesis contributes to the growing body of academic research on the JJA movement, as well as research on visual and digital representations of bodies in Sociology. Three directions for future research are outlined in the final chapter.