Poor feelings : class, desire, and affect in the writing of Michelle Tea

• Main Author: McKenna, Emma
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2012
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/43183

This project seeks to centre class as a framework for analysis of queer and feminist literary texts. It examines select works of contemporary author Michelle Tea in relation to working-class literary criticism, feminist life-writing criticism, affect theory, and queer theory. Insisting on queerness as a set of behaviors and orientations to objects of desire, I ask how a lack of class privilege may influence the desires, affects, and politics of the literary subject. I examine how a poor or a working-class identity emerges in connection to other forms of power and privilege in the writing of memoir. I question the connection of the affect shame to identity through a tracking of the moments of identification and disidentifcation that circulate around desire. I insist that the author sustains an ambivalent and ultimately productive relation to shame in her writing. This project seeks to challenge notions of upward mobility, class transcendence, and the fantasy of “the good life” that are ascribed to poor and working-class subjects by developing a queer and feminist politics that thrives on and makes a home in the present. Drawing on anti-utopian feminist theory, queer negativity, and the prose of Michelle Tea, this politics of possibility asserts that through action and inaction, being and unbecoming, movement and stasis, a radical subjectivity can emerge from and live on in the current moment despite, through, and against oppressive conditions. === Arts, Faculty of === Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, Institute for === Graduate