Queering movements, activist affect and collective autoethnography

This article considers the idea of activist affect, or when things—bodies, ideas, energies, even objects—come together, connected in what Gregg Seigworth and Melissa Gregg term “forces of encounter.” Kathleen Stewart argues that affect offers us broad-ranging ways of exploring “what happens to people, how force hits bodies, how sensibilities circulate and become … collective.” Activist affect can range from intensities on the skin to the air of a gathering march to the stillness in a crowd when someone counts down the time it takes to kill 17 and injure 15 young people in a school shooting spree. Thinking of activism through the lens of queer and affect theory allows us to reimagine how both collaborative autoethnography and social “movements” happen as well as what they look like and what they can do.