Print

xxii Introduction citizenship, the official, national “white affect” (Muñoz 2000, 68) of lack that positions the Latina/o as “excessive” (69). Drawing on Williams’s (1985) “structure of feeling” to describe points of solidarity that are his- torically situated, Muñoz (2000) proposed that “affect might be a better way to talk about the affiliations and identifications between racialized and ethnic groups than those available in standard stories of identity poli- tics” (68). Racial and ethnic difference, he says, are not only cultural but also can be understood as “affective difference, by which I mean the ways in which various historically coherent groups ‘feel’ differently and navigate the material world on a different emotional register” (70). His goal was to consider modes of relationality that do not collapse identity and affect and to enable an analytic for asking, “How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel each other?” (Muñoz 2006, 677). Through his studies of minoritarian performance and affect, Muñoz brought together the inti- mate and the public to place into view landscapes in which feelings are central to community formation, belonging, survival, resistance, and plea- sure, or “everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation that may not take the form of recognizable organizations or institutions” (Cvetkovich 2007, 461). Marcia Ochoa (2014) tells her readers, “Even while they are standing still, people do things to feel as if they’re not” (10). As she suggests, move- ment is related to feeling. We move or seemingly sit still in spaces, and as our movement creates these spaces, spaces in turn create our possibilities for relation, imagination, and senses of connection, disconnection, and belonging. Whether in youths’ interpretations of and participation in pop- ular culture, their connections in digital spaces, their movement in increasingly militarized spaces of public schools, or their passages through surveilled spaces of malls, youth feel the circulating feelings of fear, dis- dain, and suspicion that create their material worlds. Without romanticiz- ing the lives of youth or minoritized subjects, Aimee Meredith Cox (2015) calls for “acknowledgment of the dynamics of social processes and the potential held in our capacity to embrace, rather than fight against, our inevitable and perpetual displacement. We should, in fact, allow our- selves . . . to use our displacement as a starting point for regeneration and the creation of new lifeworlds and spaces that affirm our collective human- ity” (27). Often inherently displaced as they move through “public space [that] is produced as an adult space” (Valentine, Skelton, and Chambers 1998, 7), youth create other, often ephemeral, spaces that become resources for belonging and for other movements in the world. For trans, queer, and other marginalized youth, these alternative spaces and relations can be critical: “Minoritarian subjects need to interface with different subcul- tural fields to activate their own senses of self” (Muñoz 1999, 5). This acti- vation—of our capacities to affect and be affected—makes possible