In Chapter 3 knowledge from sociocultural psychology is integrated with other disciplines within psychology such as cognitive, social, and neuro psychology, and outside psychology such as sociology, visual studies, and philosophy, to tackle the power of images to influence our seeing, thinking, feeling, and remembering.

This chapter introduces the notion of the rave moment as an aesthetic experience that foregrounds affect. Its theorisation takes place in the context of an affect-deficit society through the case study of a series of dance parties that took place in Blackburn, UK, between 1989 and 1990. Seemingly resisting a categorisation within hegemonic discourses of raves, the Blackburn parties are used to show that the rave moment is a cultural product that can be exported and adapted. Its flexibility is evident in the changing character of the parties with regard to their location, organisational structure, popularity and promoted values. On the one hand, it is difficult to portray them as a coherent series of events. On the other hand, the parties were retrospectively labelled as ‘raves‘ in an attempt to fit their development into common narratives of rave culture. This tension is used as a starting point to argue for a reframing of electronic dance music events as contextualised aesthetic experiences.

This chapter addresses the nightclub as an architectural typology. It will consider what the Italian architect Carlo Caldini, co-designer and owner of Florence’s Space Electronic nightclub (1969–2017), called the nightclub’s ‘inexistent architecture’ - in other words, the importance of sound and light over bricks and mortar in the design of club spaces. This was echoed by the critic Aaron Betsky who described a design of ‘rhythm and light’ (Queer Space, 1997) in his description of New York’s iconic Studio 54. The discussion further considers a range of nightclubs from the late twentieth century including Rome’s Piper club, Florence’s Space Electronic, and Electric Circus, Studio 54, Area, and Palladium in New York. In addition, it brings in other voices from architecture, design and music – including Simon Reynolds’ concept of the ‘affective charge’, to position design and architecture as a key realm in electronic dance music culture.

This chapter theorises the embodiment of timbral gesture in electronic dance music (EDM) as a convergence point between the vexed categories of affect and meaning. It is argued that timbre is inseparable from gesture in the listening experience and that the embodiment of synthesised gestures affords listeners new ways of experiencing their body-minds by exercising their perceptual agency through sonic prosthesis. In social EDM settings, the heightened potential for entrainment to both the music and other co-participants, together with the established role of entrainment in facilitating social bonding, suggests that the timbral gestures of EDM could be key to fostering intersubjectivity among those present. Considering this, the imaginative embodiment of timbral gestures is shown to constitute a necessary first step towards the communal rationalisation of the EDM experience and the social emergence of musical meaning.

For Pascal, our knowledge of everything from geometry and the external world to God comes not from reason or experience alone, but rather it requires a feeling of “the heart.” This central notion in Pascal, which is underexplored in the literature, is the key to understanding his philosophy. This chapter develops a “cordate” (or heart-shaped) epistemology to show how the heart replaces reason and experience as the foundation in Pascal. Once we piece together an account of the heart – no easy task, since Pascal’s notes do not explicitly define it – we can trace its role in generating belief. The heart is, roughly, an affective orientation that is the seat of the will, which in turn affects experience, feelings, and perception. It even generates its own reasons. This affective orientation includes, for example, what one fundamentally loves, hates, fears, and so on. We can then see how a feeling of the heart can generate knowledge of first principles, that we are not dreaming, and, once we consider the role of the heart in Pascal’s Augustinian theology, a kind of religious engagement with the world and ultimately a love (and consequently knowledge) of God. Applications to life today are also explored.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

Chapter 4 examines the tension that exists between the visual and affective functions of the eye, as it plays out in Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and Bleak House (1853). Exploring how Dickens’s thinking about vision and tears was informed by the scientific journalism published in his weekly periodicals, it posits that his knowledge of ocular neural anatomy shaped his depiction of his characters’ divergent capacities for seeing and feeling. In Bleak House, Dickens also represents tears as part of a wider fluid network of affect that flows freely in and amongst the characters and spaces of the novel. Contemplating how this fluid feeling simultaneously flows out to meet the reader, the chapter reflects on the importance of emotion to his novels’ reception. It argues that Dickens uses affect to move his reader’s eyes, both across the page and beyond it, and that his work illustrates how there are ways of reading with feeling that are already written into the body.

Chapter 5 examines how certain conventions of the sentimental genre – like the tear and the man of feeling archetype – are taken up in the sensation fiction of Wilkie Collins. Focusing primarily on The Woman in White (1860), it suggests that Collins uses the tear as a staging point from which to mount an argument about the limits of materialism. With characters such as the infamous villain Count Fosco, he highlights the dangers involved in completely conflating emotion and physiology. With this in view, while it has become customary to see the sensation novel as a genre that addresses itself specifically to the nerves, The Woman in White pre-emptively warns its readers not to strip bodily responses of their potential for meaning.

The Introduction maps out the historical and theoretical context of Weeping Eyes, and is organised into three parts that each focus on a different ocular function. The first concentrates on crying eyes, comparing literary and scientific conceptions of tears in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and unpacking these through the contemporary theoretical lens of affect studies. The second part focuses on seeing eyes, outlining the key theoretical foundations of vision studies, and problematising long-standing associations that persist between seeing and knowing, and seeing and power. The final section takes up reading eyes, asking what sentimental texts and tears can teach us about the role feeling plays in our engagement with books. Taken together, these sections sketch out the alternative epistemologies and agencies of the eye that are elaborated throughout the rest of the study.

The chapter addresses the different ways in which Sankofa Danzafro’s Afro-contemporary dance company in Colombia constructs anti-racist narratives. From the perspective of dance as a practice of irruption and an embodied practice, we focus on the role of affective traction in its varied manifestations, which work to assemble collective bodies and discourses. Acting as a site of political enunciation and as a way of resistance-in-motion, dance generates affective atmospheres that make visible and challenge the persistence of structural racism. Among the anti-racist strategies channeled through Sankofa’s Afro-contemporary dance are i) challenging stereotypes about Afro-descendant people by focusing on the message of the dance rather than only its performance; ii) delving into the past, seeking out embodied knowledge and Afro self-referentiality as resources; and iii) developing an Afro-contemporary aesthetic project informed by Afro-Colombian traditional dance and music as well as contemporary styles and rhythms. In particular, the chapter explores Detrás del sur, a recent Sankofa dance work, to see how these anti-racist strategies have informed the creative processes behind the work.

This chapter focuses on the work of Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. It offers an account of the major strands of their thinking, how their work evolved over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, and the ways some important formulations in queer and trans studies can be traced directly or indirectly back to these writers. Sedgwick engages with the entangled relations between sexuality, knowledge, and feeling and Butler with the coconstitutive connections among gender, sexuality, and notions of embodiment. Butler’s and Sedgwick’s critiques of what were commonsensical ideas about gender and sexuality still raise powerful questions about bodies, identity, and collective movements, even as later scholarship puts pressure on the implicit frameworks that shape how those questions are posed and addressed in their work.

The 12-item Perceived Benefits of Thinness Scale (PBTS; Flatt et al., 2022)] assesses an individual’s beliefs about how being thinner would positively influence aspects of their life including their self-esteem, satisfaction, mood, relationships, and professional success. The PBTS can be administered online and/or in-person to adults and is free to use in any setting. This chapter first discusses the development of the PBTS and then provides evidence of its psychometrics. More specifically, the PBTS has been found to have a single-factor structure within exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Internal consistency reliability, test-retest reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and incremental validity support the use of the PBTS. Next, this chapter provides the PBTS items in their entirety, instructions for administration to participants, the item response scale, and the scoring procedure. Logistics of use, such as permissions, copyright, and contact information, are provided for readers.