Mixed Feelings - Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism Essay

Mixed Feelings - Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism - canvass ExampleIn exploring the politics of sensoryism and affect, I presume that the process of naming and assigning kindly and cultural meanings to bodily responses, such as sensations, has a history. My project is thus part of the larger green light of producing a history of the eubstance and of physiological experiences such as affect and sexuality. Recent scholarship in this area has been profoundly revisionist because it has provided histories of phenomena that had previously been considered natural or outside the work of culture. The importance of Foucaults work on the history of sexuality, for example, resides not just in its specific details, but in its claim that sexuality has a history and is not a natural or prediscursive entity. 1 Tracing the cultural construction of the body or sexuality has revealed how ideologies are naturalized by the often invisible work of attaching meanings to physical pr ocesses. I retain studied the sensation novel and the politics of sensation in order to participate in this broader project of exploring the political consequences of constructing the body, sexuality, and affect as natural. Thus, I am less interested in pass a descriptive history of the sensation novel than in considering how a discourse about the sensational or affective serves as a vehicle for the promulgation of ideologies of gender and mass culture. And I have found in Victorian criticism of the sensation novel an opportunity to examine how and why lividity acquired its new meaning and a bad reputation. What I have uncovered points to a more everyday theory of the politics of sensationalism.