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xviii Introduction affects can attach to particular objects” (5). Moods circulate and exist before us “as a concept, mood provides a way to articulate the shaping and structuring effect of historical context on our affective attachments” (19). Mood disposes us to certain orientations, to particular perceptions of and relations to particular objects. Closely related to moods is Raymond Wil- liams’s (1985) conception of “structures of feeling,” a term he conceptual- ized to describe “specific qualitative changes in the ways people experience their lives, the ways they think and feel about the world, that have not yet hardened into ideologies” (Flatley 2008, 25). Williams’s (1985) point was to emphasize the inchoate, ephemeral, and emergent nature of structures of feeling as “a social experience which is still in process” (132) and to distin- guish them from “worldview” or “ideology.” Structures of feeling center “meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt . . . thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a liv- ing and interrelating continuity” (132). Kathleen Stewart (2007) offers a language for understanding “ordinary affects” as “public feelings” (2), calling ordinary affects “more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings” (3). Ordinary affects suggest the openness of what we attend to and the relations we form: “The first step in thinking about the force of things is the open question of what counts as an event, a movement, an impact, a reason to react. There’s a politics to being/feeling connected (or not), to impacts that are shared (or not), to energies spent worrying or scheming (or not), to affective contagion, and to all the forms of attunement and attachment” (16). Stewart’s conceptual- ization of ordinary affects necessarily employs new language to evoke the ways we attend to events, scenes, and objects, which “hit us,” “exert a pull on us,” “surge,” and “jump” (4). Transpersonal rather than personal or indi- vidual, affects “work not through ‘meanings’ per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds. Their significance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possi- ble” (3). These thoughts and feelings may align or misalign us with domi- nant ideologies, emergent structures of feeling, and positions in old or new social relations. Affect, Discourse, and Ideology Much inquiry into youth sexualities examines ideology or discourse in order to understand the ways media, policy, schools, and social service agen- cies frame young people. For example, Cruz (2011) borrows Pillow’s (2004) language of “discursive climate” to refer to backlash, public indignation, and scapegoating of queer youth of color, single mothers, and immigrants that