”Show some emotion!” Om emotionella läckage i akademiska texter och rum

Abstract

The article ”Show some emotion!” invites the reader to a dog-walk through the leaking and cracked up theoretical and emotional landscape of contemporary feminist academic writing. It also pays a short visit to the (in Sweden) ongoing debate on the consequences of adapting to a so called ”excellence culture”, especially for critical feminist research in the humanities and social sciences. What is the cost for ”passing”? And, due to the less debated requirements of ”writing in English” as equivalent for ”internationalisation”: what is possibly gained – and what is lost in translation, from the inside-perspective of a ”small” language/ mother-tongue such as Swedish? Along the way, the dog-walking and talking of the text finds its inspiration both in theoretical and in literary texts. It tries to make use of a hybrid, ”leaking” and experimental stylistic attitude, which strives to be both polyglot and polyphonic; both democratic and emancipatory in its effects on the reader. Thus, the overall aim of the article is to explore and challenge the notion of academic writing and knowledge production as an rational, ungendered and unemotional activity. In addition to the so-called ”surplus of knowing”, that is said to be a gain for the individual researcher, the article argues that we also ought to pay attention to the unrecognized ”emotional leakage” that occurs alongside in all intellectual work. In feminist and gender theory the emotional experiences of gendered power relations in academia have often been derived from personal and psychological factors – instead of a plausible result of an emancipatory and anti-hierarchical epistemological claim. The improductivity of the dichotomies between reason and emotions, as well as between academic and literary writing, is demonstrated, drawing on three ”emotional leakage”- situations in the works of three pathbreaking feminist theorists: bell hooks, Sara Ahmed and Donna Haraway. hook’s ”passionate feminist politics”, Ahmed’s illuminating analysis of ”the cultural politics of emotion” and Haraway’s daring challenge to use ”dog writing” as a metonym for feminist writing, altogether highligths the importance of style as method and as a potentially emancipatory strategy.