Description: Xine Yao explores the racial and sexual politics of unfeeling--affects such as coldness, insensitivity and sexual frigidity that are not recognized as feeling--as a means of survival and refusal for people of color and queer people in nineteenth-century America.
Review Quotes: "Against the affective economy in which white pain demands racialized consolation and white sympathy extorts racialized gratitude and emotional labor, Xine Yao's original study examines 'disaffection' as a powerful practice that refuses the affective obligations of the nineteenth-century liberal social order. To be 'disaffected' is more than the absence of feeling--it is rather to feel otherwise, to refuse affective coercion, to stay with the negativity of unfeeling and to interrupt its rehabilitation, and more importantly, to invent counterpractices of sociality and care from below."--Lisa Lowe, author of "The Intimacies of Four Continents"