I’ve always assumed that the most useful work of this sort is likeliest to occur near the boundary of what a writer can’t figure out how to say readily, never mind prescribe to others.—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching FeelingI initially intended to introduce this issue by adopting the stance of etymological sleuth. I imagined myself stalking the word “affect,” tracing its social, philosophical, and political lives, gesturing toward its multiple histories, asking what work it achieves—for whom and when and why. Such an approach has merit insofar as words (not just words like affect, but perhaps especially words like affect) are sly, fickle things. They sidle away when you’re not looking. They crawl up, around, and over meanings, blurring sense-making with sensation. But upon reflection, and considerable anxiety over how I might synthesize the varied neurobiological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical lineages at stake without resorting to obtuse jargon or tired cliché, I abandoned that approach: it’s far more pleasurable to luxuriate in the irony that much of what is talked about in affect theory is that which escapes, resists, or exceeds language. In a tradition stretching back to Baruch Spinoza and carried forward by Gilles Deleuze, affect “inheres in the capacity to affect and be affected.”1 It refers to processes of potentiality and becoming, to vital forces and intensities, to physiological and biological matters that lie outside discursive structures. This may be why some variants of affect theory in the humanities and social sciences today circulate in writing so abstruse, or “aloof,” as Tavia Nyong’o puts it, as to paradoxically estrange us from the sensate, material body. “In talking about affect,” he muses, “I have noticed [that] one can easily lose the thread quite suddenly, in mid-conversation, and sometimes cannot seem to pick it up again despite continuous further discussion.” Given the intellectual gains of the past two decades that affect studies has afforded queer theory in particular, Nyong’o is not willing to dismiss the matter entirely. But the situation “presents a perplexing irony: have our attempts to move closer to the shapes and textures of everyday feelings moved us further from the live wires of felt concern?”2I feel that perplexity too. Occasionally I’m baffled. But I also believe that wrestling with “the boundary of what a writer can’t figure out how to say readily” is worth the effort. It’s also worth recognizing that part of the difficulty for many theories of affect lies in the methodological implications of singling out a sensory moment that is never in the “here” and “now” but always in process, always becoming, always a vibrant somatic resonance operating somewhere in between. This is why Teresa Brennan focuses on the “transmission of affect” rather than a physiological experience or phenomenon.3 For Sara Ahmed, affect is “what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connections between ideas, value, and objects.” She describes happiness, for instance, as “the messiness of the experiential, the unfolding of bodies into worlds,” as well as “‘the drama of contingency,’ how we are touched by what comes near.”4 “Contingency” is a good term to think with, as is “relational,” in part because theories of affect are absolutely alien to the idea of a singular, core self. Whether experienced as a somatic irruption, a vibrant flash of feeling, or a shift in the atmosphere, affects move people and things in unpredictable ways.Put another way, theories of affect deflate illusions of the sovereign self and embrace mutability, a world in constant flux. Laughter, for instance, which Maggie Hennefeld explores in this issue, is an affect often described in terms that suggest a displacement of the self—to be “beside oneself” with laughter, as the saying goes. Beyond that, laughter can be contagious, impossible to corral as it leaps from one convulsing body to the next. Of course, there are no guarantees—personally, politically, ethically, physiologically, or otherwise—that a good laugh will lead to something new or better than what exists in the here and the now, much less to a transformative, collective body politics. But then again, it just might. Drawing together sources from varied historical, political, and theoretical scales, Hennefeld’s wide-ranging study both interrogates and clarifies some of the most interesting feminist work on affect studies today. As anyone who has experienced a good laugh will know, it is difficult to “intend an affect,” as Lauren Berlant observes elsewhere. But a promise hovers: as intellectuals, as writers, as artists, as media makers, as activists, we can intentionally be attentive to “the nimbus of affects whose dynamics move along and make worlds, situations, and environments.”5This issue of Feminist Media Histories pays special attention to the world-building shifts in atmosphere generated by media. It also takes the promise of affect studies, an attachment to the propitious and the contingent, as a call for something other than academic business as usual. Rather than cling to hard-and-fast distinctions between affect and its correlatives (emotion, feeling, sensation), for instance, the authors in this issue take their sensuous, embodied, often autobiographical encounters with media, people, and things as a premise for unsettling sedimented ways of “making sense” in academic discourse and critical expression. Terminology thus differs as a matter of course—you could even say it’s personal. Ann Cvetkovich prefers the term “feeling” to “indicate material forms of touch and sensation, categories that have been given new life by affect theory,” thus repeating a premise she elaborates elsewhere and brings into conversation here with new media artists Rachael Shannon and Zoe Leonard as well as graphic novelist Alison Bechdel.6 Kathleen Woodward agrees with Cvetkovich that the vernacular use of the term feelings makes good sense. Or, that is, some of the time. But the constellation of “geo-affects” at work in Cecelia Condit’s experimental video Within a Stone’s Throw (2012) calls for a different phrase, which Woodward terms “planetary affect” and which she distinguishes from the feminist “emotion of freedom” expressed in Condit’s latest video, I’ve Been Afraid (2020). Then again, neither “feelings” nor “emotion” adequately grasp the visceral, exhilarating, sometimes terrifying corporeal extremes of female passengers in early aviation films that Paula Amad excavates as part of a gendered “sense perception” of modernity, while Sandra Soto lingers over the multiplicity of ways that José Esteban Muñoz ruminated on “brown feelings,” which he also called a “certain brown élan vital,” a “vital force of brownness,” and a “sense of brownness” among others. Such lexical distinctions aside, a consensus prevails among these and other authors gathered in this issue: that exploring how feelings metabolize as bodies encounter a mediated world offers a powerful means of moving us to action, dreaming new forms of collectivity, and imagining alternatives to the lives constrained by empire, capitalism, heteronormativity, colonialism, racism, misogyny, and precarity.When I first began dreaming of what became this issue, it felt essential to shake things up, to see what happens when scholars discussing “affect” and “media” from the often-disparate critical ecologies of queer theory, feminist cultural studies, Black feminism, queer of color critique, and historical film feminism come together. 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