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Int J Polit Cult Soc (2015) 28:191213
DOI 10.1007/s10767-014-9190-y
Lauren Berlant
Published online: 11 March 2015# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015
Abstract To talk about affective tendencies is almost always to talk about intensities, and behind that linkage is a relation to melodrama, that modality of performance that attaches feeling states to their gestural inflation in bodily performance. In contrast, Raymond Williams model of the structure of feeling places the historical present and the affective present in a space of affective residue that constitutes what is shared among strangers beneath the surface of manifested life. Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin reads with Scott Heims novel and Gregg Araki's film to think about how to think about the structural, historical, and affective overdeterminations of underperformed emotion, tracking the emergence of a cultural style that appears as reticent action, a spatialized suspension of relational clarity that signifies a subtracted response to the urgencies of the moment (the historical moment, the sexual moment, the intimate moment, the moment where survival time is being apprehended, absorbed, and encountered).
Keywords Affect . Mysterious Skin . Gregg Araki . Scott Heim . Intimacy. History. Structure . Anachronism . Reticence . Sexuality. Trauma . Childhood . Interpassivity
Virtually all of the sex in Mysterious Skin is initiated in alien spacesaway from home, outside, among strangers, in public; on backyard swing sets, in baseball stadiums, parks, streets, bars, and motels; and only twice in a bedroom, one of which is of a stranger rapist and the other in a home whose walls are postered with explicit extraterrestrial images. What does the outside architecture of intimacy say about the world revealed by sexuality in this esthetic space? Sexualized space here provides not only a setting for fictional beings to engage in erotic sociality; and not only captures a collectively held atmosphere of heightened sexual risk and unpredictable intimacy: it also frames and foregrounds the centrality of apprehending what is impersonal, collective, and historically exemplary in the world brought into representation by Heims 1995 novel and Gregg Arakis 2004 film.
When we call an esthetic work a period piece, we usually refer to details of style, dress, and manner in relation to collectively experienced events and interpret the appearance of anachronism either as an...