A review by touchingfeeling
Depression: A Public Feeling by Ann Cvetkovich
5.0
Cvetkovich experiments with writing form and includes a memoir in the first section of the book in which she details the last years of her PhD and the first years of her working. She de-pathologizes depression (which she also names bad feelings for its banal connotations), and instead, demonstrates the ways in which it can open up new forms of sociality and serve as foundations for new forms of attachment. She later makes these claims theoretically (is this a kind of grounded theory? j/k!) For her experience, observation, and theory are wound up in each other -- and although she doesn't mention Merleau-Ponty, her queer theory is more phenomenology than psychoanalysis, unlike her interlocutors (Berlant, Panofsky Sedgwick).
She, astutely, argues against big pharma drugs to claim that anxiety and bad feelings are enmeshed in the conditions that patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism gives rise to. She uses the memoir as a way to extrapolate meaning from experience, but to also not obfuscate experience with 'simply' and immediately asking what it means. It's crucial we learn how to describe our embodied lived experience and the environment in detail. Then we can do the interpretative theoretical work. But many of us skip that step.
Her way of integrating feminist art (Allyson Mitchell! Le Tigre!) is also sharp and useful for those writing with and about feminist art.
tl;dr: If Ann Cvetkovich can have paralyzing anxieties and troubles with work, finishing, etc. then we're all doing ok! Keep on livin!
She, astutely, argues against big pharma drugs to claim that anxiety and bad feelings are enmeshed in the conditions that patriarchal, white supremacist capitalism gives rise to. She uses the memoir as a way to extrapolate meaning from experience, but to also not obfuscate experience with 'simply' and immediately asking what it means. It's crucial we learn how to describe our embodied lived experience and the environment in detail. Then we can do the interpretative theoretical work. But many of us skip that step.
Her way of integrating feminist art (Allyson Mitchell! Le Tigre!) is also sharp and useful for those writing with and about feminist art.
tl;dr: If Ann Cvetkovich can have paralyzing anxieties and troubles with work, finishing, etc. then we're all doing ok! Keep on livin!