Mediating Gender and Affect through History

This chapter explores ways in which questions of affective media stimulation become layered onto questions about gender, focusing in particular on Western understandings of mass communication. Within affect studies, affect is typically seen as a kind of unconscious bodily and psychic energy. Even when talking about mediated emotions, however, academic and popular critics of mass communication have typically imagined a very similar sort of non-conscious relationship. The history traced illustrates how the presumed “non-conscious” nature of media power reflects gendered notions about technology and the body and illustrates the gendered nature of claims about communicative over-stimulation. The chapter concludes by discussing the implications of this history for affect and gender studies more broadly.