This is a brief summary of a recent lecture "Feel Tank as Method: Why We Can't Wait Any Longer" given by Chloe Turner at the Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths College UoL on November 5, 2020.

 

Text can be read here: https://nocturnal-unrest.de/blog/lets-gift-our-labour-to-each-other

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Full audio recording of the lecture and extended open-access citation list can be found using this link .

I will be holding Feel Tank: Feminist Burnout as part of the Festival, information and ticket link are below.

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‘Feel Tanks’ (a spin of ‘think tank’) derive their name from one cell of a larger group known as the Public Feelings Project which operated from the conviction that ‘understanding affective investment can be the a starting point for theoretical insight into the workings of capitalism, racism and sexism within power structures.’ (Cvetkovich, 2012)

Through over a fifteen workshops, seminars and lectures in the UK and internationally, Chloe Turner has been using ‘Feel Tanks’ as both intellectual enquiry and call-to-arms, to consider how to sustain living under capitalism in the current moment. 

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In the continuing struggles against global anti-Black, queer/transphobic conservative governance, pandemic "new normal“ living and the stripping of arts and humanities funding, nurturing spaces of care and connection have never felt more pressing. How do we bring into being the feminist space we want to be a part of? A space where we gift our labour to each other as opposed to institutions, co-create the
spaces to weather the coming disasters and mobilise a resistance that centres pleasure and joy.

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Feel Tank: Feminist Burnout

“We learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Not being accommodated can be pedagogy. We generate ideas through the struggles we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question.”
Sara Ahmed, “An Affinity of Hammers.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, nos. 1–2 (2016): 22

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This session relates to the specific affects associated with navigating academia, activist and community spaces as bodies that are exploited to the point of burnout.

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Tickets for the session can be found here

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This Feel Tank is part of the Nocturnal Unrest: A Feminist Festival for Theory, Performance and radical Flâneuserie