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When you can approach a history of oppression ‘objectively’, that is privilege at work. I’m often asked why my work on sexual violence is so ‘emotional’—but only by the kind of people more likely to perpetrate than to experience such violence. 1/
My literal, physical body is implicated in the work I do, both b/c I do practice-as-research and because sexual violence is an embodied reality in my life and the lives of many of the people I work with for the project 2/
I can’t approach that ‘objectively’. I don’t want to. It would be a lie. How can I read Isabella’s soliloquy in M4M 2.4—‘To whom should I complain? Did I tell this / Who would believe me?’—without *feeling* the weight of 400 years of people asking the exact same question? 3/
History isn’t some cold, inert thing that’s separate from us. It’s how we were built; and how we write about it shapes the future. So let’s not pretend that we have no affective stake in it. 4/
The work that I do is possible because I can stand on the shoulders of those who have blazed a path and shown the way. Recently, I’ve been reading Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion—it’s a great starting point if you’re just beginning to think about emotionality 5/
For those in Shax/early modern spaces, I cannot recommend @ProfKFH’s work enough — especially her recent essay in Postmedieval, which (in its conference plenary form) kick-started my thinking about this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41280-020-00174-9
I’ll stop now, but please just take a beat before you tweet excitedly about, say, a database of enslaved people. Think: who cannot approach that work as merely an academic achievement? Who must confront trauma to engage? & who has the privilege to just be excited? /end
