Name: Ugly Feelings
Rating: 4 (1 reviews)
ISBN: 9780674971349

Sianne NGAI

Ngai mobilizes the aesthetics of unprestigious negative affects such as irritation, envy, and disgust to investigate not only ideological and representational dilemmas in literature--with a particular focus on those inflected by gender and race--but also blind spots in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. Her work maps a major intersection of literary studies, media and cultural studies, feminist studies, and aesthetic theory.

Ugly Feelings

Sianne Ngai

Ugly feelings' basically a cultural analysis of minor negative affects such as animatedness, envy, irritation, anxiety, stuplimity, and paranoia, with an extra chapter of one that qualifies as stronger negative affect, disgust. I honestly didn't know what i've signed up for. First of all, discussion on any feelings in general is of my interest, and i'm a shallow bish who'd pick up a book only for the pretty cover. But who knows that there are so many things to dig around feelings. This is so in-depth, intersectional, and academic, tbh mostly unreadable for me except for the chapters on envy, irritation, and disgust. Stuplimity is an emotion Ngai herself coined. It conflates sublime and stupidity but it basically means being astonished+bored. Theoretically. I still don't get it tbh, is it like O_O emoji or sth?

One interesting take from here, ugly feelings can be political and gendered too. For example, who would think that animatedness is a negative feeling?? But it is when used to support racial agenda to degrade others. It can be associated with being uncivilized, countrified, dramatic and the likes, as opposed to whites who mistake being cadaverous as being classy maybe. Sucks much?
Well, let's see what she says about envy (the chapter that interested me the most and generates most quotes on my list):

"..envy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though it remains the only agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its object."

"These films often rejuvenate antiquated stereotypical representations of female relationships from woman’s films of the 1930s and 1940s. They represent women’s friendships as plagued by jealousy, envy, and competition for men, and they teach women to beware of and fear one another. By focusing so strongly on conflicts between women, they obscure other issues related to women’s position in society, relieve men of any responsibility for women’s problems, and suggest, instead, that women should grant men primary importance in their lives because they are the only ones upon whom women can rely."

"It is impossible to divorce the pervasive ignobility of this feeling from its class associations or from its feminization, which might explain why the envious subject is so frequently suspected of being hysterical."


*elus dada*
Between this and Meeting The Universe Halfway, misogyny has penetrated everything so deeply you can literally find infinite ways of women getting trampled for no reason at all in just ALL disciplines, huh? *elus dada lagi*


One more quote from the anxiety chapter:

"In response to this imagined privation, only male subjects are capable of experiencing genuine anxiety or dread, whereas female subjects are allotted the less traumatic and therefore less profound (certainly more ignoble) affects of nostalgia and envy"

So our anxiety is invalid and painted dramatic because women are envious, but back to the envy chapter, what's perceived as envy is often only a VALID RESPONSE OF SOCIAL DISPARITIES. OH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN * unsheath katana*.

Honestly, i don't have many takeaways from this book because it's rather difficult for my reading comprehension level and vocab bank. But from the parts that i (thought i) understand, it's intriguing and quite illuminating. I have more things to pay attention to now and i'm interested to see how this really applies in pop cultures and media.

Ugly Feelings

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