What do you think?
Rate this book
Perverse Modernities
Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America
In Disaffected Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling—affects that are not recognized as feeling—as a means of survival and refusal in nineteenth-century America. She positions unfeeling beyond sentimentalism's paradigm of universal feeling. Yao traces how works by Herman Melville, Martin R. Delany, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sui Sin Far engaged major sociopolitical issues in ways that resisted the weaponization of white sentimentalism against the lives of people of color. Exploring variously pathologized, racialized, queer, and gendered affective modes like unsympathetic Blackness, queer female frigidity, and Oriental inscrutability, these authors departed from the values that undergird the politics of recognition and the liberal project of inclusion. By theorizing feeling otherwise as an antisocial affect, form of dissent, and mode of care, Yao suggests that unfeeling can serve as a contemporary political strategy for people of color to survive in the face of continuing racism and white fragility.
304 pages, Paperback
Published November 12, 2021
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 19, 2023
Affect theory has a race problem. There will always be some form of disaffect for the minorities amongst the majority population.
June 9, 2024
This book really strongly reminded me of Edward Said’s Orientalism, in that like Said, Xine Yao takes a series of 19th century literary texts and reference points to elucidate an argument about the past! :) It’s really an incredible book - I can’t recommend that people read it more!! Fanboying.
The earlier focus makes the introduction and conclusion an absolute gold mine for those of us interested in more contemporary historical periods, because the arguments she articulates can be applied to the 20th and 21st centuries just as well as the 19th!
It’s the first book on emotions history that I’ve read which looks to address frontally the ‘unfinished business of sentimentality.’ Affect theory has a race problem and this book offers a transgressive framework for understanding emotional regimes and difference. It’s also truly intersectional, largely focussing on the experience of black and indigenous women in America, and also considering disability, which is so under-considered in historical academia.
We don’t need to ‘humanise’ people with white emotional regimes and can consider the transgressiveness of ‘unfeeling’. By which Yao means, growing a thick skin, coldness, disinterest, dissociation and emotional unavailability. Or as Audre Lorde put it ‘to withstand the weather I became stone.’ Édouard Glissant described this as a ‘right to opacity’ in feeling. This reflects a way of negotiating regimes, not an inner reality. As Anzaldúa put it ‘I am not the frozen snow queen but a flesh and blood woman with perhaps too loving a heart, one easily hurt.’
The exploration of the work of the queer mixed-heritage Chinese writer Sui Sin Far was the most interesting to me of Xao’s chapters. Far wrote in 1909 of her supposed ‘Oriental inscrutability’ ‘I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most unfeeling of all races, yet I look back and see myself so keenly alive of every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live’. Really dynamic exploration of how Chinese diaspora women negotiated identity and display against a vastly racialised backdrop. Centres a really great writer!!
Concludes with her own reflections on being accused of being a ‘machine and cold’ but how this expressionless response to racist and sexist behaviour may keep women of colour safe and also deny the aggressor a pay-off. Numbing to weather the storm. ‘Let us embrace disaffection as an important tool’, Sara Ahmed’s ‘killjoy survival kit’, instead of soothing and reassuring the majoritarian feelings. So so good.
The earlier focus makes the introduction and conclusion an absolute gold mine for those of us interested in more contemporary historical periods, because the arguments she articulates can be applied to the 20th and 21st centuries just as well as the 19th!
It’s the first book on emotions history that I’ve read which looks to address frontally the ‘unfinished business of sentimentality.’ Affect theory has a race problem and this book offers a transgressive framework for understanding emotional regimes and difference. It’s also truly intersectional, largely focussing on the experience of black and indigenous women in America, and also considering disability, which is so under-considered in historical academia.
We don’t need to ‘humanise’ people with white emotional regimes and can consider the transgressiveness of ‘unfeeling’. By which Yao means, growing a thick skin, coldness, disinterest, dissociation and emotional unavailability. Or as Audre Lorde put it ‘to withstand the weather I became stone.’ Édouard Glissant described this as a ‘right to opacity’ in feeling. This reflects a way of negotiating regimes, not an inner reality. As Anzaldúa put it ‘I am not the frozen snow queen but a flesh and blood woman with perhaps too loving a heart, one easily hurt.’
The exploration of the work of the queer mixed-heritage Chinese writer Sui Sin Far was the most interesting to me of Xao’s chapters. Far wrote in 1909 of her supposed ‘Oriental inscrutability’ ‘I have come from a race on my mother’s side which is said to be the most unfeeling of all races, yet I look back and see myself so keenly alive of every shade of sorrow and suffering that it is almost a pain to live’. Really dynamic exploration of how Chinese diaspora women negotiated identity and display against a vastly racialised backdrop. Centres a really great writer!!
Concludes with her own reflections on being accused of being a ‘machine and cold’ but how this expressionless response to racist and sexist behaviour may keep women of colour safe and also deny the aggressor a pay-off. Numbing to weather the storm. ‘Let us embrace disaffection as an important tool’, Sara Ahmed’s ‘killjoy survival kit’, instead of soothing and reassuring the majoritarian feelings. So so good.
April 1, 2025
Update: thinking more on chapter 5 the like situated objectivity and specificity of racialization and variance in like the Asian and specifically Chinese experience in the US I think bumps this up to a 5 star for me and thinking more how it engages with the conventional novel and how it structures affective hierarchies and then in terms of Black radical novels how it subverts them. On top of the trap of performance and appeal to the dominant order there’s the reality that inscrutability doesn’t guarantee protection either as much as legibility is both demanded and punished as well.
//
Pretty good interrogation of how paternalistic sympathy reinforces hierarchies and so on sort of counter the mainstream understanding of civil rights and protest and so on as moral and emotional appeal. And how performing suffering to elicit sympathy and playing into the morality of the dominant order isn't effective. Also how unfeeling and emotional structures not predicated on preforming suffering are a possibly more radical path. Also implicitly how the sort of auto-theory performance of emotionally working through white guilt is more for reinforcing their position as the agential subject than liberation of the objectified. Also warning against reinventing Orientalist Inscrutability of total otherization and stereotyping analysis of surface level emotion as the whole of the others being or whatever...
//
Pretty good interrogation of how paternalistic sympathy reinforces hierarchies and so on sort of counter the mainstream understanding of civil rights and protest and so on as moral and emotional appeal. And how performing suffering to elicit sympathy and playing into the morality of the dominant order isn't effective. Also how unfeeling and emotional structures not predicated on preforming suffering are a possibly more radical path. Also implicitly how the sort of auto-theory performance of emotionally working through white guilt is more for reinforcing their position as the agential subject than liberation of the objectified. Also warning against reinventing Orientalist Inscrutability of total otherization and stereotyping analysis of surface level emotion as the whole of the others being or whatever...
Read
September 25, 2023really well-researched and also a cool slice/angle - re-interpreting the white and/or male perspective of female frigidity, black female passionlessness, oriental inscrutability as on the part of their wielders forms of Self-preservation or emotional defense.
i did ultimately think the essays all had the same pretty simple thesis without much interesting nuance, despite the range of historical topics covered being female doctor, black abolitionist, and mixed-race chinese fictions. specifically, the takeaway each time seemed to be that being devoid of emotion was a good way of denying the oppressor, and then you can have emotions towards your allies instead. i wasn't particularly blown away about this; and moreover i feel the author was pretty liberal with interpreting these disaffections as acts that express/uphold/reify "disabled" people, "queer" people, and "people of color"; i wish we got a bit more *texture* of how each of these authors would have actually considered themselves or interpreted their identity under these lenses. for race this was less of a problem, as these authors explicitly talk about being black or chinese (or in delaney's case "people of color" across indigenous populations, slave populations, freed men, and even "china men"); but i feel there are other cases across these essays where yao is more loose w it. to be clear i don't deny that some of these people were "arguably" queer [she does kind of elide how sure historians are about some of these guys tho]; i wish there was more analysis of how they deployed their disaffections in relation to their perception of their own queerness, or in relation to thinking of themselves as in coalition w other persons of color, or in relation to their perception of their disabilities. this was especially apparent in the female frigidity essay, where i feel she elides the difference between spinsterhood and queerness and New Womanhood. there is overlap and historical definitional shifts for sure; i wish they had just discussed or contextualized the nuances more here.
there were some cool moments for sure though. i liked the history of sentimentality in medicine a lot; how there was/is this attitude of passionlessness being a requirement of doctoring as a sibling to rationality, that barred women from the craft for a while. the specific take that anesthesia made it easier to accept women in medicine because they wouldn't have to be exposed to pain was pretty cool. i also just liked learning about sui sin far, and her embracing of her chinese identity as a mixed race white-passing woman in the era of the chinese exclusion act. in general learning about figures like Martin Delaney (one of the first black men to be accepted and then kicked out of harvard medical school, abolitionist, pan-africanist) and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper (black writer abolitionist and suffragette) was just cool. and again xine yao clearly knows their shit both about other theorists and about history. their use of primary sources to set the historical context was very cool.
this at least an extremely breezy read, and defo not a bad one
i did ultimately think the essays all had the same pretty simple thesis without much interesting nuance, despite the range of historical topics covered being female doctor, black abolitionist, and mixed-race chinese fictions. specifically, the takeaway each time seemed to be that being devoid of emotion was a good way of denying the oppressor, and then you can have emotions towards your allies instead. i wasn't particularly blown away about this; and moreover i feel the author was pretty liberal with interpreting these disaffections as acts that express/uphold/reify "disabled" people, "queer" people, and "people of color"; i wish we got a bit more *texture* of how each of these authors would have actually considered themselves or interpreted their identity under these lenses. for race this was less of a problem, as these authors explicitly talk about being black or chinese (or in delaney's case "people of color" across indigenous populations, slave populations, freed men, and even "china men"); but i feel there are other cases across these essays where yao is more loose w it. to be clear i don't deny that some of these people were "arguably" queer [she does kind of elide how sure historians are about some of these guys tho]; i wish there was more analysis of how they deployed their disaffections in relation to their perception of their own queerness, or in relation to thinking of themselves as in coalition w other persons of color, or in relation to their perception of their disabilities. this was especially apparent in the female frigidity essay, where i feel she elides the difference between spinsterhood and queerness and New Womanhood. there is overlap and historical definitional shifts for sure; i wish they had just discussed or contextualized the nuances more here.
there were some cool moments for sure though. i liked the history of sentimentality in medicine a lot; how there was/is this attitude of passionlessness being a requirement of doctoring as a sibling to rationality, that barred women from the craft for a while. the specific take that anesthesia made it easier to accept women in medicine because they wouldn't have to be exposed to pain was pretty cool. i also just liked learning about sui sin far, and her embracing of her chinese identity as a mixed race white-passing woman in the era of the chinese exclusion act. in general learning about figures like Martin Delaney (one of the first black men to be accepted and then kicked out of harvard medical school, abolitionist, pan-africanist) and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper (black writer abolitionist and suffragette) was just cool. and again xine yao clearly knows their shit both about other theorists and about history. their use of primary sources to set the historical context was very cool.
this at least an extremely breezy read, and defo not a bad one
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews