affect alien, normative regimes and holding on.
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To be able to discuss what Sara Ahmed means when she uses the term “affect alien” it is important to present what affect theory is. This is essentially the idea that our bodies have the ability/capacity to register a change of state. The way one is affected by things around us changes our world completely.
Sara Ahmed states that to be affected by something is to make a judgment about how it makes us feel. Your personal experience throughout life creates the labels you attach to the emotions you feel. A small example includes the common confusion between feelings of love and fear; which are relevant to melancholic migrants as well.
Being an affect alien, in short, is being anything that deviates from “regimes of desire” which are essentially the dominant, often widely acceptable ideologies that surround us. Whether this is one’s race, sexuality, gender, or any way they choose to express themselves to the world.
The affect alien is the individual that rethinks these affect regimes; even within affected groups. (Normative regimes also exist even in alienated communities) This standard, typical world we are, more often than not, forcibly placed in (patriarchal, heteronormative, white…) is commonly presented as our “societal norms”This is precisely where the concept of the “melancholic migrant” comes in as presented by Ahmed. A melancholic migrant is an individual that somewhat holds on to these affect regimes, with many of the “labels” they create and place, being greatly based on a social/cultural belonging or attachment.
Freud famously states that grief and mourning are healthy processes when dealing with the loss of an object. (Ahmed, 138) In an ideal scenario, an individual is able to completely move on from a loss to allow room for new connections. In every loss, an individual has the option of processing and mourning the loss, or refusing and identifying with the way it used to make you feel. This...is melancholia. A melancholic attachment, which is thus experienced by melancholic migrants, is that idea of holding on. (Ahmed 139) Whether for the sake of normativity or comfort or protection, the object stays alive when you identify with it.
Ahmed shares how in Bend it It Like Beckham, Jess's father presents two different methods for her to go about things in order "not to suffer" In her words, this is a symptom of melancholia, where suffering becomes a way of holding on to a lost object.