Ann Cvetkovich is a scholar whose work explores the intersection of emotions, public life, and cultural studies. She investigates how feelings, such as depression or melancholy, are shared and shaped within society. Her analysis reveals how these public emotions influence collective experiences and public cultures, particularly concerning sexuality and gender. Cvetkovich offers profound insights into how intimate emotions resonate in the public sphere, impacting cultural and political discourse.
Focusing on the interplay between culture and globalization, this collection of essays offers fresh perspectives that challenge traditional political and economic analyses. It examines local, national, and transnational contexts, emphasizing how race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality reshape our understanding of globalization. By providing models for cultural studies, the work encourages a re-evaluation of these dynamics, highlighting the complex relationship between global and local influences.
In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.
Argues for the importance of recognizing - and archiving - accounts of trauma
that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of
catastrophe. This title contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by
too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the
experiences of women and queers. schovat popis
Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and cultural critique in search of ways of
writing about depression as a public cultural and political phenomenon rather
than as a personal medical pathology.
