Ugly Feelings

by Sianne Ngai

Envy, irritation, paranoia—in contrast to powerful and dynamic negative emotions like anger, these non-cathartic states of feeling are associated with situations in which action is blocked or suspended. In her examination of the cultural forms to which these affects give rise, Sianne Ngai suggests that these minor and more politically ambiguous feelings become all the more suited for diagnosing the character of late modernity.

Along with her inquiry into the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust, Ngai examines a racialized affect called “animatedness,” and a paradoxical synthesis of shock and boredom called “stuplimity.” She explores the politically equivocal work of these affective concepts in the cultural contexts where they seem most at stake, from academic feminist debates to the Harlem Renaissance, from late-twentieth-century American poetry to Hollywood film and network television. Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella Larsen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchcock, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening.

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of ugly feelings to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature—with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race—but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, Literary Criticism, Psychology, Criticism

432 pages, Paperback

First published February 28, 2005

About the author

Sianne Ngai is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Ugly Feelings and Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, winner of the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize. Her work has been translated into multiple languages, and she has received fellowships from the Institute of Advanced Study in Berlin and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Reviews

[Seth · Rating 4 out of 5]

This brilliant debut book of literary criticism and theory has received widespread praise and attention--rightly so. Ngai provides a real high-note to the "affective turn" in humanistic scholarship with this volume on the "weak negative affects" that--unlike stronger, more thetic and cathartic negative feelings, like anger--mark the blockage of possibility while also opening novel terrains for rethinking the subtler forms that socio-political agency may take in capitalist culture.

The chapters proceed in relatively straightforward fashion through a series of ugly feelings and related terms--beginning with a foundational introduction and chapter on "Tone," followed by chapters on animatedness (in the affective and the claymation sense), envy, irritation, anxiety, "stuplimity," and paranoia. Ngai closes with a brilliant afterword on disgust. These chapters are sure to contribute importantly to any future studies of their respective feelings, and for the most part Ngai lays a very generative and insightful groundwork.

The chapter on tone provides an exceptionally nuanced analysis of repetition's various roles in prose fiction. The one on animatedness provides a compelling reading of race, focusing especially on the bizarre claymation TV series, The PJs. And the subsequent chapter on envy offers an exceptionally strong reading of Single White Female in relation to envy's fraught role in feminist discourse and the thinking of feminist solidarity. The chapter on "stuplimity," perhaps the book's strangest, elaborates this new term--Ngai's coinage--as an aesthetic or affect similar to the sublime, in that it involves perception of something too large to wrap one's head around. But stuplimity differs in two crucial aspects: unlike the sublime, its object is not infinite but rather finite or even conspicuously systematic, but is extensive enough that it cannot be thought or perceived as a whole; and secondly, because the stuplime object lacks the sublime object's reference to a transcendent infinitude, it results in a dedramatized kind of affective diminishment, rather than the sublime's polar intensities of terror and joy--a stupor or stupefaction, hence "stuplime." While one wonders about the necessity of this neologism, Ngai uses it to specify an important and common variety of affect or aesthetic experience--a variety already hinted at, arguably, in Zizek's writing on the sublime, in Lyotard's "postmodern" sublime, and (via Zizek) in my forthcoming work on Steven's shorter poems. This more worldly, quasi-sublime variety of feeling lurks, as Ngai suggests, in a wide range of conceptual and experimental arts from modernism to the present; kudos to her for giving it the attention it deserves.

Ngai's writing is generally quite lucid and enjoyable. She has a conspicuous penchant for the long introductory clause, which takes some getting used to, but she illuminates difficult conceptual terrain with a reassuring steadiness. The book's frequent recourse to Melville's work, though often generative, feels a bit arbitrary and could use more justification. But ultimately, as a project about a specific category of affective experience, the question of literary genealogy may fall justifiably into the wastebin. And despite the weird gravitation to Melville, Ngai does venture into a variety of contemporary artistic scenes--most notably in "stuplimity," "paranoia," and "disgust"--and it's really wonderful to see such strong work being done on contemporary visual artists and poets.

All in all, this was a great read. Ngai's next project covers the lighter side of contemporary aesthetic categories--addressing the (merely) interesting, the cute, and the zany. Articles on the former two have appeared in Critical Inquiry, and work on the latter is forthcoming, I am told, from PMLA.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

bip BOP this is Ngai's firstish book of critical theory , diving into UGLY FEELINGS , irritation - anxiety - paranoia - envy & working around disgust, 'stuplimity', animatedness. As ever I don't find it the gulp&move on that sometimes happens it's one to work with, revise chapters and note note note. Big love for her work on The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein (I'm predictable). Also I like how she plays Clarice's GH at the end. A good critique of Kristeva in here, though I won't give her up yet. LOTS of Melville talk which I like. but be ready

also just saw the image they have for the piece covering her in the Frankfurter Allgemeine (why ? ) BOOTS. is it a good article? I doubt

[Lena , süße Maus · Rating 3 out of 5]

some very fascinating insights, but waaay too many tangents that seem to hardly (if at all) contribute to her arguments and a startling amount of very long direct quotes -- probably more than I've ever seen in any academic work. also, some impressively long run-on sentences.

[Markus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of this is really good and useful analysis, but a lot are diversions which barely have anything to do with the subjects at hand

[Aggrey Odera · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful, thorough, well written work of cultural theory. Ngai analyzes states of affect that she refers to as “ugly feelings”; feelings not like the grand strategic emotions typically connected with political action (eg anger, or fear - as in Machiavelli or Hobbes) nor like those that lend themselves almost to a sense of the transcendental - like sublimity. Ugly feelings, instead, are such affects as Envy, Anxiety, Animatedness, Irritation, Stuplimity, Paranoia, Disgust, liveliness etc. Ngai contends that ugly feelings are “semantically negative” - in the sense that they are associated with meanings and values that are socially stigmatized, and “syntactically negative” - in the sense that they are marked by their “trajectories of repulsion” rather than attraction.

Ugly feelings, Ngai believes, mark our general affective state under late stage capitalism, and their general presence in our lives is marked by a sense of irony; “the inherently ambiguous affect of affective dissociation in general - what we might think of as a state of feeling vaguely unsettled or confused, or more precisely, a meta-feeling in which one feels confused about what one is feeling”. This confusion is not in the epistemic sense in that we don’t know what we are feeling or have the language for it; it is in the affective sense in that we are bewildered that we are feeling this way- we are unsettled that we are unsettled.

Ugly feelings are marked by states of inaction and usually a sense of a lack of direction, and not many of them can be thought of as “emotion proper”. Even when they are directed (as for example envy and disgust), their “trajectories are directed towards the negation of the objects they are directed towards, either by denying them or by subjecting them to epistemological skepticism’.

Theorists like Brian Massumi and Lawrence Grossberg argue for a certain distinction between emotion and affect - emotion, they think, requires a subject whereas affect does not; emotion is narratively structured whereas affect is more like just a general sense of feeling; and therefore, that emotion is contained by personal identity in a way that affect is not. Ngai’s working assumption does not draw as fine a distinction as that of Massumi and Grossberg: while she does indeed agree that affects are less structured or formalized than emotions, she thinks that they are not entirely lacking in form or structure, and can thus be analyzed similarly to emotions.

In the end, Ngai argues that the importance of understanding ugly feelings is that their unsuitability for forceful and ambiguous action (as opposed to strong affective states like rage or terror, where one cannot be ambiguous about what terrifies them or enrages them) “is precisely what amplifies their power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular”.


Tone

The first state of affect that Ngai analyzes is tone. Through detailed readings of Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and “The Confidence Man”, Ngai argues for the presence of an organizing quality of feeling that permeates every literary work. This feeling is tone. “Tone is a feeling which is perceived rather than felt, and whose very nonfeltness is perceived. There is a sense then, in which its status as feeling is fundamentally negative, regardless of what the particular quality of affect is.” (pg 76). Confidence, Ngai contends, is the tone of capitalism, for, as Melville notes: “confidence is the indispensable basis of all sorts of business transactions. Without it, commerce between man and man, as between country and country, would, like a watch, run down and stop”. Ngai analyzes writings by other prominent philosophers and writers, most notably Santayana and Kant, to further argue for the idea of tone as an affective state.

Animatedness

Ngai argues that one prominent way through which, in the age of mechanical reproducibility, affect becomes recognizable, is through a corruption of the basic feeling of being “moved”. The supposedly neutral state of being moved comes to be seen as a kind of “innervation”, “agitation” or as Ngai prefers to call it, “animatedness” - a kind of emotional expressiveness particularly thought to be the preserve of the person of colour (most notably the black woman). This creates an interesting paradox: the animated subject is unruly - and this serves to other her, but she is also supposedly a being unusually receptive to external interference - and this reasoning is used to attempt to control her.

Thus hand-wringing Jews, gesticulating Italians, over enthusiastic Irish people, hot tempered Greeks, hyperexpressive blacks, overemotional Latins - versions of these excessively “lively” or agitated ethnic subjects abound in American literature and media throughout the twentieth century, and serve as markers of racial otherness. These racialized ideas of animatedness are thus weaponized as markers of the otherness (and implicitly, inferiority) of the “ethnic” subject as lacking in manners, and therefore as a prime candidate to be controlled for the sake of polite bourgeois WASP society. As Melville notes of his “overenthusiastic” Irish characters: “To be full of warm, earnest words, and heartfelt protestations, is to create a scene; and well bred people dislike few things more than that”.

Envy

Through a reading of Freud’s work side by side with the 1990 film “Single White Female” (SWF), Ngai argues that envy has been formalized into a decidedly feminine emotion, and that this feminization and the moralization that proceeds from it has robbed the affective state of envy of its “ potential as a means of recognizing and polemically responding to social inequalities”.

Ngai thinks that the way we often critique envy (think of feminist critiques against Freud’s ‘Penis envy’ for example) - treats envy as describing a subject who lacks, rather than the subject’s affective response to a perceived inequality. In other words, Freud’s penis envy, for example, regards envy as saying something about the subject’s internal state of affairs (deficiency) as opposed to a statement by or from the subject concerning a relation in the external world (inequality).

Envy, she thinks, though it is the ONLY agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its subject (you have what I do not), has been denied cultural recognition as a valid means of publicly criticizing inequality or responding to social disparity. This is most shown by the “integration of envy “into the 19th century ideologeme of ressentiment; the ‘diseased passion’”. The result is, as the Marxist thinker Fredric Jameson notes, genuine political questions about inequality are discredited by being ascribed to states of “private dissatisfaction” or “psychological flaws”. → “Hence once it enters a public domain of signification, a person’s envy will always seem unjustified, frustrated, and effete - regardless of whether the relation it points to is imaginary or not”.

Moralized and uglified to such an extent that it becomes shameful to the subject who experiences it, envy also becomes stripped of its potential critical agency - as an ability to recognize, and antagonistically respond to, potentially real and institutionalized forms of inequality.

Ngai contends that from the nineteenth century onwards, envy has been seen as primarily a female emotion (yet at the same time one most inexcusable in women). Thus the thrust of Ngai’s critique here is that the ugly feeling of envy, when thought of as a response to valid inequality, as opposed to a state of private disaffection, can be a tool useful in theorizing about and combating the specific subjugation of women.





Irritation

Irritation is for Ngai “the problem of incorrect or inadequate anger”. The chapter on irritation in Ngai’s book is accompanied by an illuminating reading of Nella Larsen’s Harlem Renaissance novel “Quicksand”. By analyzing a racist scene in which the main character of the novel, Helga, is involved in, and her subsequent reaction to the racism - she is merely irritated at the racist, not angry or confrontational - Ngai shows how we ourselves, readers, become irritated at Helga for being simply irritated, for we view her response as inadequate.

Indeed, as Ngai argues, “Irritation and its close relations - bother, annoyance, vexation, aggravation, pique - might be described as negative affect in its weakest, mildest and most politically effete form. One is tempted to vote it the dysphoric effect least likely to play a significant role in any oppositional praxis or ideological struggle”.


Anxiety

Ngai argues that anxiety as an affective state has not only been gendered as male, but also seen as the affect of a particular kind of male - the intellectual. Thus “neurasthenia” was seen as the affliction of the bookish nineteenth century young man.

Ernst Bloch thought of anxiety as an “expectant emotion”. Whereas all emotions according to Bloch referred to the “horizon of time”, anxiety was the kind of future oriented emotion that “opened out entirely into this horizon”.

But anxiety also has a spatial dimension in addition to this temporal one; anxiety not just projected to a future event but also “something ‘projected’ onto others in the sense of an outward propulsion or displacement - that is, as a quality or feeling the subject refuses to recognize in himself and attempts to locate in another person or thing”.

Through readings of Herman Melville’s Pierre, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo & Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), together with Freud’s work on the castration complex, as well as other works of literature and philosophy, Ngai shows the gendered nature of anxiety; how only male subjects are capable of “experiencing genuine anxiety or dread, whereas female subjects are allotted the less traumatic and therefore less profound (certainly more ignoble) affects of nostalgia and envy”. Even in the continental tradition of existential philosophy, the privileging of anxiety as a key for interpreting the human condition is accompanied by its being secured as the distinctive - if not exclusive - emotional province of male intellectuals (Kierekergaard’s agitated young scholars; Mozart’s hypermasculine and aggressively heterosexual Don Giovanni - described as “anxiety itself”)



Stuplimity

“Stuplimity” is Ngai’s word for the particular affective state that arises when one experiences stupefaction and sublimity at the same time. Ngai argues that this intersection of the astonishing and the boring (as for example in the artwork of Jeff Koontz) presents a way of expanding our concept of aesthetic experience in general under late stage capitalism. Through a reading of Homer Simpson's character in the TV show The Simpsons, together with Gertrude Stein’s “The Making of Americans” and Samuel Beckett’s “Westward Ho”, Ngai attempts to detail our aesthetic experiences as defined by the inarguably antithetical temporalities of shock and boredom experienced together.


Paranoia

Ngai sees paranoia as a gendered affect. Through a reading of the X-Men together with Frederic Jameson’s “The Geopolitical Aesthetic”, Ngai sees the conspiracy theory - the hallmark of paranoia - as “an epistemology underpinned by the affective category of fear”, that “ becomes safeguarded through the genre of the political thriller as a distinctively male form of knowledge production”.

Paranoia, thinks Ngai, is taken to be “a species of fear based on the dysphoric apprehension of a holistic and all encompassing system”. Jameson’s work in his criticism of capitalism, for example, refers to “the system” - something that Ngai sees as “ a totalizing abstraction that is not only a singular and unified system, but also one anthropomorphized into a subject capable of “understanding” its enemies and “dealing” with them accordingly”.

Because of this association that paranoia is given with theorizing and knowledge productions about “systems”, scholars such as Naomi Schor attempt to claim a specifically female form of paranoia because as Ngai notes, “the question of whether such a clinical category even exists poses the more urgent question of whether females are capable of theorizing at all”: i.e. One cannot theorize if one is not paranoid. Thus in a world where “any analysis of power at the transindividual level increasingly requires a language capable of dealing with ‘the system’ as an abstract and holistic entity”, the word ‘patriarchy’ is to feminists what the idea of ‘the system’ is to anti-capitalist male intellectuals such as Jameson as the idea of ‘the swamp’ is the synecdoche used by Trump supporters who are conspiracy theorists.


Afterword: On Disgust

This is in my opinion the most interesting section since disgust is the strongest of these ugly feelings. But my fingers are tired from typing so if you want to learn more about this, read the book (the section on disgust is only 34 pages or so).

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

aesthetics / lit crit / affect theory approaching "minor" affective states such as:
irritation
envy
anxiety
paranoia
stuplimity
disgust

-ugly feelings that tend to be seen as politically inadequate (as opposed to ostensibly more politically effective states like anger, for instance) - and how various texts/artists variously mobilize them in part to convey art's own limited agency to effect social change; art theorizing its own failures:

"These situations of passivity [using Bartleby as prime example], as uniquely disclosed and interpreted by ignoble feelings like envy (of the disempowered for the powerful) or paranoia (about one's perceived status as a small subject in a 'total system'), can also be thought of as allegories for an autonomous or bourgeois art's increasingly resigned and pessimistic understanding of its *own* relationship to political action." (3)

the chapter on Stein and stuplimity is particularly good as is the irritation chapter (reading Nella Larsen), also good is the chapter on the gendering of paranoia in the X-Files and feminist avant-garde poetry; really good synopsis of the arguments over the politics of form as put forth in theories of "feminine"/feminist avant-garde writing. the chapter on animatedness as a racialized affect in The PJs is fascinating as well.

[Christopher · Rating 2 out of 5]

Dnf at PG 158, about halfway. This book is horrible and never sticks with the object under discussion, it keeps slipping into theoretical bickering and using scenes from a film or a sentence from a book to jump back to some barely legible academic discussion that isnt super illuminating for our experience of frustrated agency.

If you are coming to this hoping for something on par with Lauren Berlant's work in affect theory, no you arent getting that. I'm really disappointed bc this was important territory and the prose is too much of a turn off. You cant talk about good literature with occluded prose like this. Again its just another symptom of not fully engaging with the subject matter. Ngai is more interested in the theoretical debates shes working through than showing what these pieces of pop culture can reveal to us about our undernarrated or under discussed and suppressed/unacknowledged feelings and blockages/deadlocks.

[Hollis]

Ngai gives very illuminating readings of her texts, in particular on Melville's Confidence Man in her first chapter on "tone" and Nella Larsen's Quicksand in her fourth chapter on irritation. These readings often divulge into less interesting theoretical debates (featuring lengthy quotes and endnotes--so the supplements are there for those interested!), though I did find the discussion of late 90s feminist discourse in the third chapter on "envy" (and the movie Single White Female) to be an intriguing distinction. While I'm not SO invested in many of the academic surveys Ngai spends time with, each chapter still feels motivating one at least one level, whether that's the close-reading of a primary text or the way Ngai represents the political and intersectional depth of these feelings.

Chapter 6 on "stuplimity" might be the most interesting on a personal level because I feel like Ngai actually made up a new term there (or I'm terribly ignorant and don't feel like googling or skimming the endnotes) to describe the impact of deeply repetitive, avant-garde experiments with language and reader-response. In it, Ngai often contrasts a particular strain of boredom with Kant’s sublime, arguing that this boredom produces a distancing effect between the text and reader—“Stuplimity reveals the limits of our ability to comprehend a vastly extended form as a totality, as does Kant’s sublime, yet not through an encounter with the infinite but with finite bits and scraps of material in repetition” (271). Its resultant “indeterminate affective state” may be what qualifies stuplimity as an ugly feeling, but one with potential to open the subject to new perceptive capacities (284).

Another chapter I like is 2 on "animatedness" which Ngai treats as the most racialized feeling in the book. I still wonder if this is more of a perception projected onto others rather than a feeling experienced per se--something I believe Ngai touches on, while also perhaps taking for granted the perception of animatedness as a fact of experience for the other. One could say that each feeling collected in the book is both perceived and felt, but I believe this animatedness is particular in its nature as something that must be perceived and named before being felt by the subject. Perhaps that is why it is the feeling most acknowledged in terms of its racial subjectivity. Each chapter provokes its own intriguing questions.

[Charlie Kruse · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book, honestly one of the best books that I've ever read. Each chapter an absolute banger in terms of careful attention to detail. No stone is left unturned, and Ngai in interrogating our relationships with these feelings, overturns any semblance of a stable connection with these feelings. Instead, there is always a struggle, some itch not scratched in our ideas of envy, disgust, and irritation.
And every single chapter leads down new roads; perhaps the idea of tone must be interrogated to reveal that there is a distance we take from affect to even begin an academic discourse, or perhaps the paranoia that inflects the interstices between feminist avant-garde poetry and post-structural discourse, or maybe the connections of animation within a racial-historical framework, using the 1990's TV show The PJs as it's referent.
Ngai is one of the most accessible, formidable and remarkable theorist living today. Her work explores the absences, the voids, or the unwanted dregs of theory that she breaths life back into, or reveals has been living this whole time. She's become one of my favorite authors, and I can only hope to write half as well as her.

[Susan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is stuffed full of smart and startling ideas, as well as fresh interpretations of an astonishing range of things from feminist theory to recent poetry, television, film, novels, contemporary art. I found the book a total delight to read, all manner of texts and issues are handled lightly, imaginatively and incredibly intelligently, if on occassions somewhat quickly. Ugly feelings, the main theme of the book, are states we don't like to examine, yet Ngai's book demonstrates how much can be gained from careful attention to them--the study of irritation in Nella Larsen's Quicksand is fantastic. The book is also an object lesson in how to think about the affective dimension of diverse cultural practices.

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t dislike the book. The premise, on the need to theorize “ugly feelings” is, I think, correct. I struggle with critical theory because I often feel like I don’t know the cultural references well enough, nor are they summarized well enough, to really follow the authors argument.

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s difficult to add to (or detract from) such a well-received book of literary criticism. I had to re-read maybe 2-3 chapters twice before I could quite follow Ngai thinking. Her chapters on Stuplimity and Paranoia fell off for me towards the end after a strong start. The examples she draws from seem a bit too random for me, even for a book that claims to be primarily one of “theory.” 4.5 /5.

[Philip Mlonyeni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Starter veldig sterkt de tre første kapitlene, men blir etter min mening progressivt dårligere utover. Siste kapitlet tar den seg opp igjen. Anbefales, om ikke annet fordi det første kapitlet er dritbra.

[Teleseparatist · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting theory. Must go back to the other chapters one day.

[Darcel Anastasia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Literature "may in fact be the ideal space to investigate ugly feelings that obviously ramify beyond the domain of the aesthetic proper," (2)

[Kara]

consider my brain exercised.

[Rebecca Jensen · Rating 2 out of 5]

only finished it for the sake of my exam 😵‍💫 did not enjoy

[Amy Gentry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ten years out of academia, Ngai is the only scholar (aside from friends) whose work I still go out of my way to buy and read. An indisputable classic of criticism, the kind of work I wish I could have done.

[Loisa Fenichell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Finally!

[amyleigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me a while to get through because of its density and just all the pieces that I wanted to hold onto. Sianne N'gai's writing is so so smart. All of this, really. How minorness might be a form of political agency, the accruals of small, the accumulations of irritation. Sideways building, exhaustions, fragile feelings and refusals that hold such large possibilities for staying with. Bodies in heaps, lumps, refusing animation, lurking and gathering.

[Stephen Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read more recently and was less impressed with the argumentation. Ngai is obviously brilliant and her readings are virtuosic, but several moves that she makes--from her historicization to her side-stepping of the affect/emotion split--don't read as entirely convincing and/or remove some of the most compelling aspects of affect theory.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book - what a fascinating concept, and what strong execution. I have a feeling I should have had a good deal more Heidegger under my belt before reading this, but I still got a lot out of it.

[Rafael Pajaro - Rafa · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little dense, but some of the most interesting contemporary scholarship. I came across Sianne Ngai in the footnotes of an essay on friendship and I really like what she has to say on Paranoia, Boredom, Envy etc.

[Brittany · Rating 5 out of 5]

* to be clear, I’ve only read portions of this book for graduate class and research, but I loved those portions and plan to read the whole thing when I have time (ha!).

[Georgiana Cleveland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes dense and difficult, but the ideas are worth the effort.

Invaluable to my thinking about ambiguous affects and aesthetics, and their political uses/implications.

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

Introduction, tone, animatedness, envy, irritation; dazzling dazzling intellect...

[Qonita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ugly feelings' basically a cultural analysis of minor negative affects such as animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, and paranoia, with an extra chapter of one that qualifies as stronger negative affect, disgust. I honestly didn't know what i've signed up for. First of all, discussion on any feelings in general is of my interest, and i'm a shallow bish who'd pick up a book only for the pretty cover. But who knows that there are so many things to dig around feelings. This is so in-depth, intersectional, and academic, tbh mostly unreadable for me except for the chapters on envy, irritation, and disgust. Stuplimity is an emotion Ngai herself coined. It conflates sublime and stupidity but it basically means being astonished+bored. Theoretically. I still don't get it tbh, is it like O_O emoji or sth?

One interesting take from here, ugly feelings can be political and gendered too. For example, who would think that animatedness is a negative feeling?? But it is when used to support racial agenda to degrade others. It can be associated with being uncivilized, countrified, dramatic and the likes, as opposed to whites who mistake being cadaverous as being classy maybe. Sucks much?
Well, let's see what she says about envy (the chapter that interested me the most and generates most quotes on my list):

"..envy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though it remains the only agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its object."

"These films often rejuvenate antiquated stereotypical representations of female relationships from woman’s films of the 1930s and 1940s. They represent women’s friendships as plagued by jealousy, envy, and competition for men, and they teach women to beware of and fear one another. By focusing so strongly on conflicts between women, they obscure other issues related to women’s position in society, relieve men of any responsibility for women’s problems, and suggest, instead, that women should grant men primary importance in their lives because they are the only ones upon whom women can rely."

"It is impossible to divorce the pervasive ignobility of this feeling from its class associations or from its feminization, which might explain why the envious subject is so frequently suspected of being hysterical."


*elus dada*
Between this and Meeting The Universe Halfway, misogyny has penetrated everything so deeply you can literally find infinite ways of women getting trampled for no reason at all in just ALL disciplines, huh? *elus dada lagi*


One more quote from the anxiety chapter:

"In response to this imagined privation, only male subjects are capable of experiencing genuine anxiety or dread, whereas female subjects are allotted the less traumatic and therefore less profound (certainly more ignoble) affects of nostalgia and envy"

So our anxiety is invalid and painted dramatic because women are envious, but back to the envy chapter, what's perceived as envy is often only a VALID RESPONSE OF SOCIAL DISPARITIES. OH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN * unsheath katana*.

Honestly, i don't have many takeaways from this book because it's rather difficult for my reading comprehension level and vocab bank. But from the parts that i (thought i) understand, it's intriguing and quite illuminating. I have more things to pay attention to now and i'm interested to see how this really applies in pop cultures and media.

[Swarm Feral · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty good taxonomy of feelings that exist at certain troubling impasses.

Envy; Unlike resentment, which can fuel polemic consciousness, envy remains personal and isolating. It is a comparison and lack seeking disposition.

Anxiety; A diffuse, low-level dread that does not lead to direct action. In a world of constant crisis and surveillance, anxiety becomes a way of managing subjects through self-regulation and risk avoidance.

Paranoia; A feeling of hyper-awareness and suspicion, which can be politically insightful but also self-destructive. Ngai links paranoia to state surveillance, conspiracy theories, and racialized policing.

Irritation; Unlike righteous anger, irritation is petty, nagging, and difficult to mobilize into action. It often comes from power imbalances that are too small to be addressed through direct confrontation.

Stuplimity (Stupor + Sublimity); A mix of being overwhelmed and numbed at the same time. In an age of information overload and bureaucratic inertia, people experience stuplimity rather than awe or horror.

Animatedness; A racialized affect where Black people are portrayed as overly expressive or excessively emotional. This feeling is forced onto marginalized people through stereotypes of hyper-emotionality, making them seem irrational or non-agentic. Think Minstrel shows and then Black emotional expression being read in that over expressive valence. This section was good to pair with Disaffected by Yao and Palmer's "What Feels More Than Feeling"

[Yassir Morsi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this book
Ngai’s Ugly Feelings is a groundbreaking work of affect theory that challenges traditional understandings of emotion in literature and culture. Rather than focusing on powerful emotions like anger, love, or grief, she centers what she calls “ugly feelings”; the low-intensity, obstructed, and often mild affects such as envy, irritation, anxiety These are not transformative emotions, but minor, stuck, or suspended states, marked by a lack of resolution.

Ngai argues that these affects are not merely personal or psychological, they are also political. They reflect how individuals navigate late capitalist environments. For Ngai, these ugly feelings signal how agency is frustrated. How it is deferred. they are diluted.

Each chapter focuses on a particular affect. I really enjoyed "animatedness", which she argues becomes racialized in representations of Black and Brown bodies as overly emotional; or anxiety, which reveals power’s internalisation through constant self-monitoring and hyper vigilance.

Ugly Feelings does not call for the elimination of these feelings, but for their recognition as critical responses to social contradictions.

[Petja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Olisin halunnut pitää tästä, mutten lopuksi saanut mitään irti. Pointtina on tarkastella taiteen vähäisten huonojen tunteiden poliittista potentiaalia: ts. tarkastellaan kateutta, ahdistusta, hämmennystä jne. 'suurempien' tunteiden kuten vihan ja häpeän sijaan. Ngai tekee yksittäisiä mielenkiintoisia huomioita tunteista erilaisissa teksteissä ja elokuvissa (vaikkapa huomio, ettei kateus aina ole perusteetonta, vaan voi myös tehdä näkyväski luokkasuhteen). Kuitenkin pääasiassa kirja edustaa sitä genreä, jossa monimutkaisella kirjoitustyylillä peitellään esitettyjen ajatusten heppoisuutta.