Abstract

This article develops the ongoing relevance of the late feminist theorist Teresa Brennan's thinking about affect in her posthumous book, The Transmission of Affect. Guilmette introduces the value of an image-text format, inspired by a multimedia example from Brennan's unpublished papers. Experimenting with images as well as words, Guilmette explores Brennan's conceptual distinction between affect and feeling through its recent uptake by decolonial feminist and queer readers, as a turn from the Western emphasis on individual agency to consider instead the responsibility that follows from what is absorbed into our bodies and psyches, and how we discern, work through and, when needed, resist these energetic transfers.