Everyday World- Making: Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering

By Julia Lane

This cross-disciplinary collection considers the intersection of affect and mothering, with the aim of expanding both the experiential and theoretical frameworks that guide our understanding of mothering and of theories of affect. It brings together creative, reflective, poetic, and theoretical pieces to question, challenge, and re-conceptualize mothering through the lens of affect, and affect through the lens of mothering. The collection also aims to explore less examined mothering experiences such as failure, disgust, and ambivalence in order to challenge normative paradigms and narratives surrounding mothers and mothering. The authors in this collection demonstrate the theoretical and practical possibilities opened up by a simultaneous consideration of affect and mothering, thereby broadening our understanding of the complexities and nuances of the always changing experiences of world-making.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Demeter Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781772581522

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World-Making

Copyright © 2018 Demeter Press

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Everyday world-making : toward an understanding of affect and mothering / edited by Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-77258-140-9 (softcover)

1. Motherhood--Psychological aspects. 2. Affect (Psychology). I. Lane, Julia, 1986-, editor II. Joensuu, Eleonora, 1983-, editor

HQ759.E94 2018 306.874’3 C2018-900233-6

Everyday World-Making

Toward an Understanding of Affect and Mothering

EDITED BY

Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu

DEMETER PRESS

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

The Everyday World of Affect and Mothering:

An Introduction

Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu

Sisterly Conversation:

Considering Affect With and Through the

Pregnant and Birthing Body

Eleonora Joensuu and Sofia Joensuu

I. BECOMING AND PERFORMING MOTHER

Becoming Mother, Performing Mothering

Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu

milk

Kari Marken

Navigating the Waters of Early Motherhood:

Somatic Awareness, Creative Expression, and Being Held

Stephanie Theodora Park

A Poetics of Maternal Failure

Julia Lane

Objects of a Maternal Haunting

Anna Johnson

Empty Maternal:

Simulating Maternal Care in Marina Abramović’s

The Artist Is Present

Justyna Wierzchowska

II. MOTHERING AND THE POTENTIALS OF DARK AFFECT

The Dark Side of Mothering

Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu

That Baby Will Cost You:

An Intended Ambivalent Pregnancy

Sandra L. Faulkner

Blood, Mud, Poop, and Vomit:

Reimagining Disgust Through the Mother-Child Relationship

Eleonora Joensuu

Unforgivable or Outlaw Emotions? The Heart of Maternal Darkness in Grazia Verasani’s From Medea

Alessandro Castellini

fail

Kari Marken

III. MANOEUVRING THE BOUNDARIES OF MOTHER

Blurring Boundaries, Manoeuvring Motherhood

Julia Lane and Eleonora Joensuu

Anishinaabe Fasting: Respecting the Power of Creation

Nicole Bell

Mothering the Mother: Doulas and the Affective Space

Brenda Benaglia

Instinct, Expertise, Connection:

The Affective Experience of Mother’s Intuition

Emily Sadowski

Families We Don’t Choose:

Affects of Resisting the Institution of Motherhood

Lisa Poole

Sisterly Conversation:

Considering Affect Through Mothering Experiences

Julia Lane and Trang Do

About the Contributors

Acknowledgements

We would like to gratefully acknowledge all the hard work put in by the authors whose chapters appear in this collection. Specifically, we would like to thank them for their commitment to the extensive process of review and revision that it took for us to collectively arrive at this finished piece of scholarship. In the very next breath we would therefore also like to thank the four anonymous peer reviewers who devoted time, energy, and insight to providing us with feedback. Their comments were simultaneously gracious and gritty, careful and challenging, and they resulted in both structural and substantive changes. This book would be less rich were it not for the efforts they took to help us.

Finally, we would like to thank Demeter Press (and specifically Andrea O’Reilly, May Friedman, and Angie Deveau) for their support in making this book a reality.

This book was edited on unceded Coast Salish land; the traditional lands of the xwməθkwəyəm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and Səlílwətał (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

The Everyday World of Affect and Mothering

An Introduction

JULIA LANE AND ELEONORA JOENSUU

MOTHERING IS FILLED with affective experiences that may surprise, delight, shock, and even horrify us. Encounters with disgust, humour, empathy, agony, grief, and ecstasy, for example, can present mothers and those engaged in the labour of mothering with unexpected challenges and joys. These new, difficult, or surprising encounters and affects may even be the defining characteristics of mothering for some. To consider these encounters alongside the most general definition of affect—the capacity to affect and to be affected (Massumi, Notes)—invites consideration of the unique capacities presented by motherhood, mothering, and the sociocultural figure of mother.

For many, the term affect is attended by an air of mystery, given the challenging and sometimes jargon-laden ways it has been described in theory and philosophy. Indeed, such a term may represent, for some, the kind of scholarship that separates the ivory tower from the rest of the everyday world. Those who are more familiar with the term affect may more readily agree that the everyday practices of mothering are affective, or affect-filled, forms of labour and experience, yet both affect and mother remain slippery terms. Affect has been at the centre of theoretical and disciplinary debates since the affective turn of the 1990s in the social sciences and humanities. As a result, definitions of affect are varied and diverse. Early affect research began with the attempt to distinguish affect from feeling and emotion; however, subsequent work began to question and to blur these categories, as it became apparent that a transdisciplinary framework was necessary to account for the dynamic nature of affect. Still, many scholars are fiercely protective of their position on affect theory and equally opinionated about what it means and does not mean. Affect has often been characterized as nonconscious, embodied, and asocial intensities that can escape [the] defining constraints of language, culture, and power (Boler, Feminist Politics 1493; Ducey; Massumi, Parables). In contrast, emotions have been understood as more formed and structured than affects (Ngai) and as representative of subjective experiences of feeling that can, unlike affect, be qualified through language (Boler, Feminist Politics; Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect). As interest in affect has grown, accounts have become so diverse and multifaceted that they can no longer be rendered into a tidy picture (Seigworth and Gregg 5).

Mother is a similarly evasive word. Despite a relatively straightforward common sense usage, both the motherhood studies literature and firsthand accounts from self-identified mothers make it clear that the boundaries of mother are neither clear nor static. In her text Maternal Encounters, Lisa Baraitser explains the elusiveness of mother, as metaphor, figure or trope (3): ‘The mother’ after all, is the impossible subject, par excellence…. In some senses she is everywhere, our culture saturated with her image in its varied guises, and yet theoretically she remains a shadowy figure who seems to disappear from the many discourses that explicitly try to account for her (4). Even more disconcerting is that many discourses continue to avoid accounting for mothers, and dismiss through omission both mothers’ lived experiences and their cultural and theoretical significance. The persistence of this lacuna, paired with the impossible status afforded to the figure of the mother, motivated us as scholars—and as a mother and an auntie to young children—to ask a deceptively simple question: what can we see about mothering through the lens of affect, and vice versa?

Our editorial collaboration also grew out of our friendship, which was itself cemented through the personal and scholarly challenges we experienced together as graduate students. Our personal research interests—disgust, clowning, ethics, and failure—have made excellent fodder for conversations, many of which have led us into the complex and rewarding realm of affect theory. When I (Julia) became pregnant during the last stretch of my dissertation writing, Eleonora was a trusted friend and confidante: she listened to and validated my concerns, and helped me to make sense of my (new) life. Like my good friends, the field of motherhood studies became a source of both comfort and understanding for me, and reinforced my increasing awareness that motherhood was more complicated than I ever could have imagined. What is more, it provided me with ways of naming my own confusing lived experiences. The early motivation for creating this collection was, therefore, simply recognizing that there was, to our knowledge, no sustained attention being paid to the affect of mothering in the academic literature. Although neither Eleonora nor I consider ourselves experts in the fields of motherhood or affect studies, we feel strongly that this gap limits the ways that we, as scholars, can speak about the lived experiences of mothering and about the significance of affect.

The lack of consideration of mothering in the realm of affect theory, and of affect theory in the realm of motherhood studies, is in one sense surprising given the persistent association between women, mothers, and emotions in both Western epistemology and popular culture. In another sense, the gap is perhaps not so surprising, since, as Boler highlights, emotions are considered risky business in scholarship: they are culturally associated with femininity, ‘soft’ scholarship, pollution of truth, and bias (Boler, Feeling Power 109). Although it is true that affect is distinguished from emotion, it is also true, as Monica Greco and Paul Stenner point out, that drawing an overtly sharp (and value laden) distinction between affect and emotion serves, paradoxically, to perpetuate the illusion that such words refer unproblematically to states of the world, thus bypassing the need to think carefully about the conceptual issues at stake (11). Maintaining a sharp distinction between affect and emotion would seem to be antithetical to many scholars’ understandings of the fluid and boundary-shifting existence of affect. As Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn highlight, an approach to affect should consider what different versions of affect theory do in our theorizing, instead of asking What is affect? (8). In this collection, we wonder what the lens of mothering does to affect theory, and we simultaneously ask what happens to our (understanding of) mothering when we directly address its affective dimensions and potentials.

Discussing affect and mothering together can present a direct challenge to the sharp distinctions that have sometimes been drawn between the realm of affect and the realm of emotion. Such sharp distinctions can contribute to a highly gendered division of forms of human expression such as, for example, philosophy and memoir.¹ Firsthand accounts of mothering proliferate, including a significant body of writing about the (often surprising, stuttering, shocking) experience of becoming mother, yet little work has been done to consider these as forms of affective writing, as they have been dismissed as simply emotional. This lack of critical analysis is all the more disappointing given the ways that specific mothering experiences may both nuance and, in certain cases, provide living examples of some of the larger and more philosophical claims made in affect theory. For example, Sianne Ngai argues that the theoretical distinction between emotion and affect has been made, in part, to differentiate feeling that is contained by an identity from feeling that is not (27). Many of the affects and experiences discussed in this collection have traditionally been contained by the identity of mother in problematic and limiting ways: Firstly, this coupling has restricted the forms of account that can be given of emotions and experiences by suggesting that they only pertain to those who identify, or can be identified, as mother. Secondly, the restriction of particular experiences, emotions, and feelings to the particular identity mother is problematic because the term has been dominated by essentialist, normative, and individualistic definitions.² A consideration of affect, therefore, allows us to expand our understandings of mother, affect, and the intersections between the two.

As such, we do not take up debates about how affect should be understood or examined, nor do we adhere to strict definitions and distinctions between affect, emotion, and feeling; instead, we prefer to consider the affective intensities that attend emotions, feelings, and experiences. Furthermore, we maintain that affect theories can do something important in analyzing and experiencing motherhood and mothering. Affect theories afford visibility for the ways that experiences, emotions, feelings, and affects can extend beyond individuals, identities, categories, and the ability to name them as such. Here we align ourselves with Raymond Williams’s work on structures of feeling, in which he posits that feelings do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures (133). Mothering, too, we suggest has long exerted such palpable and affective pressure, and has done so in ways that push against, or manoeuvre within, the definitions seeking to contain the practices of mothering and mothers, as individuals and collectives.

Affect theory provides tools to make sense of these affective intensities as they move between bodies, and between bodies and environments. The work of Brian Massumi in particular offers ways to think about affective experiences as moments of potential, capacities, and movement; he therefore posits a hopeful form of theory that suggests different ways of being, feeling, experiencing, and making meaning in the world. This possibility of being other than we have been leads Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg to claim affect as promise (12). The strengths and promises of affect theory create the potential of accounting for what we, as editors, have called the everyday world-making of affect and mothering.

EVERYDAY SURGING AFFECTS—GUIDING FRAMEWORKS

Everyday life is a life lived on the level of surging affects, impacts suffered or barely avoided. It takes everything we have. But it also spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things. (Stewart 9)

The framework for affect we take up as editors resonates with the work of Lauren Berlant in Cruel Optimism and Kathleen Stewart in Ordinary Affects. Both theorists attend to the everyday: Berlant’s sensorium of the present (12) and Stewart’s ordinary affects (1). The everyday or ordinary is significant because it is made up of the struggles, forces, and efforts of world-making. Continuing to broaden our understanding of mothering as a cultural, social, political, and economic practice requires attending to the ordinary wherein such mothering is being crafted, struggled for, and lived. Mothering happens in the world—the everyday, ordinary world—which perhaps goes some way to explaining why mothering (as a practice and a concept) and mothers (as people) have had to push so determinately to gain even a tenuous foothold in the privileged spaces of theory, philosophy, the academy.

Much of the world only works thanks to the labour of mothers and their various forms of mothering labour. Here we appreciate Sara Ahmed’s definition of labour as includ[ing] reproductive labor: the labor of reproducing life; the labor of reproducing the conditions that enable others to live (Feminist Life 85). Mothers—and, more broadly, acts of mothering—take on this labour in its various meanings: the labour of birthing, the daily labours of caring for children and others, and the multifaceted forms of mothering labour that allow others to live, work, think, theorize. Mothers and acts of mothering are frequently depoliticized and disempowered through the presumption that they are simple, commonplace, and easy to know. Although our collection foregrounds the ordinary and the everyday as significant research sites for considering and experiencing both affect and mothering, we do not, as a result, wish to suggest that either should be viewed as commonplace.

Broadening the boundaries of mother is pressing because the ordinariness of mothering—the rhythms of feeding, changing diapers, sleep, and sleeplessness—are so commonplace and mundane that they are all too easily ignored, and rendered invisible and inconsequential. Consider, for example, the words that Andrea O’Reilly uses to describe patriarchal motherhood: isolation, dependency, boredom, and exhaustion (Rocking the Cradle 48). Oftentimes, the result of this isolation and exhaustion is that the voices of mothers and experiences of mothering remain marginal. Baraitser expands on this understanding, by considering the ways that mothers often fall outside of the grand narrative:

motherhood lends itself to anecdote rather than the grand narrative of mother-writing due to the constant attack on narrative that the child performs: literally breaking into maternal speech, and as well as her own self-narrative which is punctured at the level of constant interruptions to thinking, reflecting, sleeping, moving and completing tasks. What is left is a series of unconnected experiences that remain fundamentally unable to cohere. Secret, private and certainly unpublished, they resurface as anecdote—often in the form of funny stories we tell each other about silly or charming things our children did or said. (15)

Though silly or charming, these everyday, ordinary anecdotes of mothering are so far from the grand narrative that to tell them can result in being dismissed as silly, not serious, and even uncommitted (O’Reilly, Rocking the Cradle 32). Affect provides one way into this ordinariness as it registers the conditions of life that move across persons and worlds, play out in lived time, and energize attachments (Berlant 16). Through the lens of affect, anecdotes, funny stories, and secret confessions about mothering are no longer dismissible as unreliable, uncommitted personal stories; instead they emerge as the moments of world-making.

It is our shared conviction that strict definitions—of affect and of mothering—do not serve our purposes because they tend to limit and constrain, whereas our interest is specifically in the forms of manoeuvrability, the potentials, and the becomings characterizing the lived experiences of affect and of mothering. Although these terms—manoeuvrability, potentials, and becomings—have taken on particular definitions across the affect literature, we evoke them here in their everyday sense. When we say manoeuvrability, we refer to the mother making her way through the grocery store with children, stroller, and grocery cart in tow, and also to the mother making space within a role, and a term, that can feel inescapably limiting and restrictive. More broadly still, we consider the possibility of movement for concepts, narratives, terms, and even experiences that have become stagnant and stuck. When we write of potentials, we wish to evoke the world-making possibilities attending the everyday experiences of mothering and affect: the possibilities that those who mother are aware of and experience on a daily basis, such as the momentousness of witnessing another human being as she takes her very first steps; and also the possibilities that, all too often, seem impossible and forbidden for those who mother. Finally, when we consider becomings, we evoke the process that can attend mothering—the sense of transformation, as well as undoing, that mothering can invite again and again, in the course of one’s acceptance and rejection of oneself as a mother. The plural form of the term becomings is useful here as a way of signalling that this process may happen, simultaneously, all at once and slowly over the course of a lifetime.

As we shift the focus from what affect is to what affect does, it is crucial to also shift from discussing who and what mothers are to considering mothering as a practice defined by its socio-economic, cultural, and historical contexts, and as potentially sharing an affective dimension transcending these distinctions and boundaries. Our call for papers for this book, therefore, encouraged submissions from across disciplines to mobilize a multiplicity of perspectives, voices, and methodological approaches in response to our provocation to consider mothering and affect together. As Patricia Ticento Clough argues, the turn to affect or affective turn requires a transdisciplinary approach to theory and method that necessarily incites experimentation in capturing the changing cofunctioning of the political, the economic, and the cultural (3). The essays in this collection are a kind of transdisciplinary experimentation to bring the lenses of motherhood studies and affect studies into focus with each other, a focus that has been limited thus far in the existing research. The following questions have guided us in the creation of this book: What can we understand about mothering, mothers, and the institution of motherhood through a consideration of affect? What can we understand about affect by examining how it is at work in mothering? These questions opened up inquiry, conversations, and connections. We understand them as affording us a place to begin considering affect and mothering together, rather than as questions to which we could find and offer definitive answers. There are few, if any, answers in this collection. This is neither an error nor an omission. It is purposeful. Answers are all too often stopping places. We resist such stopping in favour of the perpetual becoming, the opening of potentials, the dynamic manoeuvrings that we see at the heart of affect and of mothering. Even in the absence of definitive answers, the opportunity to interrogate both canonical and everyday assumptions about mothering and affect opens up new insights. These insights, in turn, have the potential to change the way we think, feel, experience, and live as scholars, as mothers, and as people who are impacted by the ongoing marginalization of the affective intensities of mothering which, in a very real sense, is everyone.

A PLACE TO START

There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds. (Seigworth and Gregg 4)

This collection, too, aims to engage with the multiple iterations and possibilities of affect, and theories of affect. What we have sought to do here is to invite highly particular voices from within the bodies, affects, worlds of mothering into the multiplicity of perspectives comprising affect theory. This collection contains a rich diversity of perspectives, and the subject matter has asked all the authors to stretch themselves. For many of us, either affect theory or motherhood studies was unfamiliar scholarship before we began this work. The chapters in this collection are therefore truly essays, in the original spirit of the word; they are attempts, tries. They are opportunities to piece together and present some ideas in the hopes that something will emerge. As editors, we are excited by this collection as a place to start the conversation, and we are aware that there is significantly more work to be done. We would, therefore, like to position the insights and connections that have already been sparked as an invitation to others to take up the work of considering affect and mothering together. This collection is intended as a space in which we can begin to attend to the affects of mothering, which so easily slip through the cracks of our attention. It is an evocation, not an end.

We are specifically aware that there are some important omissions in the present collection, and we want to take this opportunity to call out the need for further considerations of mothering and affect, especially in the realms of race, economics, gender, disability, sexuality, and mothering practices that bring complexity to the conventionally presumed birth mother-child dyad. Each of these areas represents a diverse and rich field of study and a unique and important realm of affective maternal experience. Both affect and motherhood studies are strengthened by the infinitely multiple iterations through which they can be conceived. It is thus our sincerest hope that this collection serves as a spur for future questions and discussions.

Given the diversity of perspectives and styles of writing represented in this collection, we have organized the text into three thematically linked sections: Becoming and Performing Mother, Mothering and the Potentials of Dark Affect, and Manoeuvring the Boundaries of ‘Mother.’ Each section begins with a focused introduction situating the individual pieces in the broader collection. The frequent return of the introduction feels conceptually fitting, considering our intentional situating of this text as a starting point and as an inquiry into manoeuvrability, potential, and becomings. There are two chapters that fall outside of these sections—the Sisterly Conversations that serve to frame this collection. These conversational pieces allow us to begin and end in the everyday in a twofold way: first, they have allowed us, as editors, to begin our investigation into affect and mothering through conversation with mothers close to us in our personal lives. Second, these conversations give voice to the funny, painful, and difficult moments of everyday mothering and ground the entire collection within stories shared over a meal and during stolen moments away from the demands of caring for children. Both sisterly conversations weave affect theory into their questions and discussions, yet they remain in the ordinariness of affect and the ordinariness of mothering. Using these interviews to frame the collection also foregrounds the voices in which these ordinary mothers speak—a choice made intentionally (and perhaps provocatively, for some) to serve as a corrective to a status quo called out by Adrienne Rich, and still true forty years later, that the one group whose opinions and documentation we long to have—the mothers—are, as usual, almost entirely unheard from (130). The positioning of these conversation pieces serves as a clear marker of our stance on the seriousness of the maternal voice. To us, this is the everyday voice of world-making.

ENDNOTES

¹And, even more specifically, the recently identified genre of momoir.

² See Andrea O’Reilly’s article We Need to Talk about Patriarchal Motherhood, as well as Lisa Poole’s chapter Families We Don’t Choose in this book, for a more thorough discussion of ten ideological assumptions that inform a definition of motherhood.

WORKS CITED

Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Duke University Press, 2017.

Baraitser, Lisa. Maternal Encounters: The Ethics of Interruption. Routledge, 2009.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

Blackman, Lisa, and Couze Venn. Affect. Body & Society, vol. 16, no. 1, 2010, pp. 7–28.

Boler, Megan. Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. Routledge, 1999.

Boler, Megan. Feminist Politics of Emotions and Critical Digital Pedagogies: A Call to Action. PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 130, no. 5, 2015, pp. 1489–496.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. Introduction. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 1–33.

Ducey, Ariel. More Than a Job: Meaning, Affect, and Training Health Care Workers. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, Duke University Press, 2007, pp. 187–208.

Greco, Monica and Paul Stenner. Introduction: Emotion and Social Science. Emotions: A Social Science Reader, edited by Monica Greco and Paul Stenner, Routledge, 2013, pp. 1–22.

Massumi, Brian. Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgments. A Thousand Plateaus, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Continuum, 2004, pp. xvii–xx.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002.

Massumi, Brian. The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, no. 31, 1995, pp. 83–109.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2009.

O’Reilly, Andrea. Rocking the Cradle: Thoughts on Motherhood, Feminism and the Possibility of Empowered Mothering. Demeter Press, 2006.

O’Reilly, Andrea. "We Need to Talk about Patriarchal Motherhood Essentialization, Naturalization, and Idealization in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin." Journal of the Motherhood Initiative, vol. 7, no. 1, 2016, pp. 64–81.

Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. WW Norton & Company, 1995.

Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. An Inventory of Shimmers. The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Duke University Press, 2010, pp. 1–25.

Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press, 2007.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977.

Sisterly Conversation

Considering Affect With and Through the Pregnant and Birthing Body

ELEONORA JOENSUU AND SOFIA JOENSUU

THE FIRST OF THESE two conversations took place between my sister Sofia and me (Eleonora) in September of 2016 in Vancouver, British Columbia. Sofia was thirty-eight weeks pregnant. Sofia’s first child, Milla, was born in 2014, and she was eagerly waiting to become a big sister.

To give some more background to the conversation, this pregnancy was Sofia’s third. The second pregnancy, which Sofia refers to in the discussion, ended in a late-term loss due to complications. We remember Lucas every day and carry him in our hearts.

My sister and I sat facing each other on our parent’s living room couch. It was a familiar spot, as it was where we had spent many evenings together while growing up. It seemed an appropriate place to have this conversation. Our mother was in the kitchen making lunch while we chatted. The audio recording of this conversation is filled with the clangs of dishes being set out, the whir of the hand-mixer, the shrill and sudden ring of a cooking timer. These sounds are the ones I associate with my mother’s mothering of my sister and me, and so it seems just right that they make up the background of this conversation on mothers, mothering, and the affect and affectations they hold. My questions and comments are in italics.

Affect is a broad area of research and spans philosophy, sociology, geography, and critical studies, to name just a few. There are disagreements about what separates affect from emotion and feeling, and there is a lot that can fall into the spaces between these concepts. I am interested in your reactions and reflections on one of these particular approaches to affect. One argument is that affect is distinct from emotion and feeling because it is conceived of as nonconscious, while emotion registers a physical response that may or may not come to conscious attention. In contrast, feeling has been talked about as the perception of that bodily experience and requires awareness and attention in order to be a feeling. I would like to provide you with a concept of affect that upholds these distinctions. This concept argues that any event has two levels at play: the first being a kind of intensity or state of suspense and potential disruption (Ducey 191) and then a second level marked by narration, language, and expectation (Ducey; Massumi, Parables). These levels are linked to one another, and affect is then the point of emergence or point of vanishing between these two (Ducey 192). Another way to think about that is that affect is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential (Shouse 5). I know this is very abstract, but do any of these descriptors resonate with your experience of pregnancy thus far?

When I reflect back on my first pregnancy with Milla, I didn’t know I was pregnant, and my body was definitely doing things. Like, I remember I had shortness of breath, and I had this weird feeling in my body that I couldn’t figure out or pin down. I remember being like, huh and being aware that I’m feeling something. Or I had awareness of my body in a different way. It was two days later that I found out I was pregnant, and then that knowledge structured everything I had been experiencing and gave meaning to all my other physicality.

That’s interesting because your description definitely resonates with thinking of affect as indeterminate potential (Massumi, Future Birth 53)—and, furthermore, the idea of the second level where the event translates into expectation. It’s almost like before you had that knowledge that could name those experiences as something, affect existed as suspense, intensity, or different changes in intensity.

It was curiosity for me as well, wondering what was going on with my body. I remember thinking, woah, what is this? I can’t catch my breath and I feel lightheaded. But then when I found out I was pregnant, suddenly it gave structure and explained away everything else in my body.

So do you feel like your experience of those physical experiences changed once it was narrated and named as something concrete?

Yes. I think it made it less scary.

Was it less potentially disrupting?

Yes. It was no longer a wondering what was going on with my body. I had an explanation for the physical aspects.

Another way that we can think about affect is that it is the realm of potential from which cognitive realizations are drawn (Ducey), so it sounds like you can really distinguish that realm of potential shifting into cognitive realizations?

Yes, for sure, especially so in the first pregnancy when I didn’t know, but was experiencing physical changes that I was aware of, and which I didn’t have in subsequent pregnancies. In those cases, I was already anticipating the physical signs because Neal and I had made an active decision to try to get pregnant, while that first time, I had no idea and didn’t know.

It sounds as if in the subsequent pregnancies there wasn’t the same distinct movement or translation from a place of unformed, unstructured potential to narration and expectation as there was in the first pregnancy?

I was already anticipating it, so I was looking for those physical sensations, expecting them. In some way, I was working backward in the next two pregnancies.

This makes me think of an argument about affect that says that language, cognition, decision making, etc. reduces intensity, con- verting suspense into expectation (Massumi, Parables 26-27).

I would very much relate to that with my first pregnancy. I also feel like there are connections here to labour. There was a certain point in labour where the cognitive part of me no longer functioned so that it didn’t impact intensity because I could no longer be thinking rationally to say oh, this is X part of the contraction. In the beginning of labour, I was thinking, ok I’ve taken the [birthing] course, Neal and I can talk about what state of labour I’m in, etc. There is a very cognitive, scientific approach to it. But then at a transition point—I can reflect back on it only now—but in that moment … Neal and I often talk about it … I went internal. You become very animalistic; I no longer had