Has Affect replaced Desire? Queer-feminist Genealogies and Perspectives in Affect Studies

According to Angerer (2015) affect replaced the Foucauldian sexuality-dispositif as well as psychoanalytical interpretations of desire due to technological and political changes in the 21st century. Instead of emphasizing this binary view on affect studies and psychoanalysis or discourse analysis, theorists like Cvetkovich (2010), Ahmed (2004; 2017) or Hemmings (2012) seek to overcome the dichotomy between affect and emotion by way of exploring overlaps as well as differences between affect/emotion/feeling and desire. Drawing on queer-feminist genealogies, they question dichotomies of affect and emotion, immediacy and representation, male and female genders or male and female sexualities.
Building on overcoming these dichotomies, I connect bodily capacities to a range of intra-psychic and interpersonal reactions to experiences, taking up the notion of script (Gagnon and Simon 1973) in the following contribution.
In line with Sedgwick and Frank (2003), I first delineate various approaches to the entanglement of affect and desire. Second, I introduce the metaphor of the palimpsest as a theoretical concept. In a third step I discuss the term ‘neosexualities’, introduced by Sigusch (2005; 2013), with regard to his statement about the de-gendering and the loss of affect in contemporary sexualities.