Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Robyn Warhol (Columbus: Ohio State UP, pages).

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1 Reviews 907 whether this theoretical/epistemological orientation can attend to the singularity of visual culture-or any other ".X"-without reducing it to another reproductive twist in the ongoing "rhetorical tum." One of the challenges for rhetoric, then, may well be to attempt to "map" a different direction for theory, one that is capable of detaching itself from its long commitment to epistemology, and thereby to representation and meaning. The strategy ofthis detachment, however, also offers a distinguished history. One might briefly note, for instance, Heidegger's tum toward language precisely as a tum away from (Husserlian) epistemology and a tum toward a revised sense of ontology. Or Derrida' s post-phenomenological project of rethinking ontology through the movement of differance. Or, most appropriately here, Deleuze's attention, in his two books on cinema, to a kind of ontology of the image. So not only is it imaginable, but it is quite possible to assume what we might loosely call an "anti-theory" position that is premised neither on a refusal of self-critical attentiveness nor on an objectivist relation to knowledge. In fact, a certain tradition of twentieth-century thought has indicated both the possibilities for and the ethical importance of this direction (and this, despite the fact that these names are frequently the ones that are invoked under the epistemologically inflected version of "theory"). In terms of "rhetoric," then, the challenge might very well be to invent a "theoretical" direction that does not finally rely on the appropriating movement of epistemology, that does not, in other words, uncritically privilege the operations of representation and meaning. In short, the challenge might very well be to develop a sense of rhetoric that is capable of responding to the specificity of its obj ect, to the singularity of, say, film. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, Robyn Warhol (Columbus: Ohio State UP, pages). Reviewed by Dale Jacobs, University of Windsor When I was first asked to review Robyn Warhol's new book, Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms, I hesitated. It

2 908 jac was late in the semester, and I was tired and rushed, the way we all are at that time of year. It had been a difficult semester in which the intersection of emotion and my professional life seemed to be nearly constant. I was drained and needed some time away from professional concerns. Ironically, however, it was the book's subject matter-the intersection of popular culture and feelings-that drew me in and finally convinced me that I should take the assignment. At the time, that was all I knew about the book, but it was enough because in that was the possibility that it would provide me with new ways of thinking about emotions and the ways in which our emotional lives are implicated in a number of discourses. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms delivers on this possibility and proves to be a welcome addition to recent work in emotion studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and composition studies. Warhol begins with the idea that reading is a physical act; her focus is on "the somatic experience of taking in narrative text." One of her purposes in the book, then, is "to find a language for talking about the reader's body" so that she can "explore alternative topographies of the relationships between reading and feeling." It is in mapping these alternative topographies that Having a Good Cry does its important work, helping us to think in new ways about the socially constructed relationships between gender, feelings, and reading. In doing so, Warhol situates herself within an important strand of emotion studies and gender studies by examining how and why some people's emotions are devalued and then trying to reclaim the importance and validity of those emotions. I want to return to that idea later in this review, but for now I think it best that I layout the basics of her argument and some of the important definitional and methodological contributions she makes in this book. As Warhol is quick to point out, when she talks about readers ' bodies, she is not mired in talking only about desire. As she argues, she wants to move away from such readings that have been the norm in work that centers on reading and feeling, dominated as it is by a psychoanalytic paradigm. Rather, she is talking about the range of feelings that are evoked by texts of all kinds; in this case, she is especially interested in texts from popular culture such as sentimental films and novels, marriage plots, serial fiction, and soap operas. In looking at such feelings as crying or physical manifestations of fear, her purpose is "to try to take the next step in feminist theory's decades-long attempt detach the 'natural' connection between (bodily) and (cultural) gender." Instead, she sees not

3 Reviews 909 only gender but also feelings as performative, socially constructed rather than somehow "natural." This thinking is not, of course, new, but it is her insistence on taking this notion of perfomativity back to its original linguistic roots in speech act theory that she makes an important point As she points out, too often through the 1990s, in studies of the body, sexuality, and gender, performativity was used in a theatrical rather than a linguistic sense. She instead argues that, performativity should be linked to J.L. Austin's idea of performatives, utterances such as "I promise to review this book," which in essence perform the act to which they refer. This sense of what performativity means has also been lost within composition studies in recent years and I appreciate her careful use of the term and the way in which she reminds us of what performativity means in this context. Moreover, her careful definition and argument allows her to extend her use of the term into thinking about feelings as performative, an important step that dovetails nicely with other recent work that has pushed us to denaturalize the way we think about emotions. Since Warhol's use of the performative is so essential to her argument, let me quote a short section of her explication of performativity and its extension into thinking about feelings: The stress in this usage of "perform," then is on causing something to come into being.... In theatrical usage (or in common conversation among anyone other than speech-act theorists), a "performance" is an act that is put on, a fictive identity assumed by a real person for the benefit of an audience. That sense of the word assumes an opposition between "actuality" and "performance," an opposition that mirrors the pairings of "sex" and "gender," "nature" and "culture," or, for that matter "real feelings" and "false sentimentalism." But the linguistic usage de constructs that opposition, for the performative utterance constitutes its own actuality; it is "neither true nor false"; nor is it, like the theatrical performance, an artifice. You can see how this use of performativity helps her to move beyond the idea that some feelings are more "true" than others or that certain feelings are naturally constitutive of a specific gender (or race or class, for that matter, though she doesn't venture into this territory). Rather, Warhol writes, "If gender is performative, that means affective experiences conforming to 'masculine,' 'feminine,' or 'effeminate' norms of bodily behavior don't express or mime or even imitate gender, they constitute it." Like other recent theorists of emotion, then, Warhol argues that

4 910 jac feelings are not outward manifestations of internal, individualized states of being. Instead, she agrees with theorists who posit that feelings are socially constructed processes that are imbedded within social structures that, through what she calls "technologies of affect," condition the ways in which we experience affective responses. In other words, for Warhol, feelings are performative rather than expressive and in this approach she sees the "potential for liberating individual subjects from the notion of a "core self," a selfthat can only by identified, diagnosed, and evaluated by a hegemonic authority that has the power to see, know, and name the "other." Her work thus contributes to the valuable scholarship that is currently going on in reconceiving emotion and feeling, especially in relation to notions of power. However, she also pushes us in important new ways in this thinking by closely examining the ways in which popular culture genres structure our feelings in ongoing ways and by introducing "effeminacy" as a third term in thinking about the socially constructed relationships between feeling and gender. By focusing on pop-culture forms and the "technologies of affect" embedded within them, Warhol is working at the important intersection of emotion studies and cultural studies, a crossroads where more work is needed if we are to understand some of the ways in which our emotions are continually constructed by the discourses in which we find ourselves immersed. Warhol writes, "By identifying narrative patterns and strategies structuring each of these popular cultural forms, this book uncovers the textual machinery inside these narrative technologies of gender, and seeks to reveal-from the inside out-the structures of feeling that constitute contemporary gendered experience." She is careful to point out that she is not attempting to examine all of emotional life, but rather "the somatic, bodily aspects of a selection of reactions-crying, hope and worry, interest and boredom, suspense and relief-that reading can invoke." This careful delineation of exactly what the book does and does not do is the kind of work that is necessary in our ongoing theorizing of emotions and their connections to issues of gender (which is covered here), as well as race and class, future studies that will benefit greatly from the work done here by Warhol. In terms of the relationship between feelings and gender, Warhol's contribution here is the delineation and defending of what she calls "effeminacy." By that she means "signs offeminine feeling in male and female bodies alike." She acknowledges the pej orative status ofthis term, but argues that in rehabilitating it, she can effectively introduce a third term that will complicate the gender binary that often underpins current

5 Reviews 911 gender theory. That is, effeminate feelings can be experienced by both men and women and should not be seen as "naturally" belonging to either gender; by defining and rehabilitating effiminacy from its current pejorative status, Warhol seeks to move beyond essentialist notions of both gender and emotion. After setting up these theoretical underpinnings and a methodology of "feminist narratology" (that seeks to look at how meanings, rather than what meanings are conveyed), Warhol goes on to provide more in-depth analysis of several pop-culture forms, devoting chapters to sentimental novels and films, marriage plot fiction and film, serialized fiction and film, and daytime television soap operas. Through close analysis, Warhol looks at how specific readerly feelings are evoked in each of these forms and the ways in which those evoked feelings are tied in to larger questions of "gendered cultural processes." Through these close readings, she successfully brings her theoretical understandings to bear upon both past and current cultural practices. In bringing together the various elements of her argument, Warhol gets to the heart of what I find most important in Having a Good Cry: developing a conception of emotions that argues against a view that "leads to the evaluation of some feelings as more genuine, more fully human than others-which leads inexhorably to the denigration of the emotional experiences of persons whose cultural or social marginality marks their feelings as "different." It is in this central tenet of her project that I find her work the most exciting and where I find the most connections to some ofthe provocative work that is currently going on in emotion studies. Emotions are, after all, one of the major ways in which human beings experience the world and one of the major ways in which our subjectivities are constructed by the world. Our emotions are constantly schooled through the myriad discourses in which we find ourselves enmeshed; we can, of course, be schooled to act in certain emotional ways and then find those emotions to be devalued. Through our engagement in those discourses, we see how our emotions are valued or devalued. That is, we experience the ways in which the performance of emotion is wrapped up with issues of power, especially in terms of race, class, and gender. Emotions, then, are both socially constructed and differentially valued; serious examination of the ways in which emotions are imbricated within webs of power relations and the "technologies of affect" that help to create and maintain those webs of power is important and necessary work. With this book, Warhol has chosen to focus on this relationship in terms of gender. In the best of all possible worlds, I would love to have seen her extend her analysis to include race and class, but

6 912 jac these areas are clearly outside the scope of her project. However, in the book as it is configured, she has given us some tools to think about how structures of feeling are created with respect to all marginalized groups and how those structures of feeling serve to maintain existing power relations. So, why is this kind of work important? Why did reading Having a Good Cry energize me atthe end of a difficult semester? To put it simply, this kind of work points us toward new ways of knowing in the field of emotion studies, ways of knowing that will help promote social change and help us move beyond conceptions of emotion that devalue the ways of feeling experienced by a vast number of people in our society. Work such as Warhol's leaves me with a sense of what is possible and of how our work can help to create real change. It's not, in my mind, simply about finding "better" ways to think about emotions; it's about finding ways of thinking about emotions that can better serve people who have been marginalized and devalued by current conceptions of emotion. In this way, I think Having a Good Cry reinforces the most liberatory strands of emotion studies. Moreover, it does so through an approach that also places it squarely within the realm of cultural studies, thus acknowledging the necessity ofthinking about the intersections between our experience of emotions and our participation in the culture of the everyday in which we live. As I have tried to outline in this review, this is work that is carefully conceived and precisely articulated and work that will help others in the field to think about how structures of feeling are constructed, maintained, and implicated in existing power relations in our society. At first glance, Having a Good Cry seems like an odd choice for a review in JA C. Having engaged with the book over the last several weeks, however, I can tell you that it isn't an odd choice at all. As I and others have argued, we need to think more about the place of emotions within composition studies-in terms of our students, teaching, research, administration, and professional lives as a whole. Having a Good Cry: Effeminate Feelings and Pop-Culture Forms is a book that will give all compositionists, but especially those interested in emotion studies, the theoretical and critical tools to forward our thinking in important and complex ways. It is the kind of interdisciplinary work that will prove invaluable to scholars in emotion studies, cultural studies, gender studies, and composition.

7 James L. Kinneavy Award Winners Each year at the meeting of the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition at the CCCC Convention, JAC presents the James L. Kinneavy Award for the most outstanding article published that year in JAC. The Award was generously endowed by the late James Kinneavy, Bloomberg Centennial Professor atthe University of Texas. Listed below are past award winners Recipients Marc Bousquet, "Composition as Management Science: Toward a University without a WPA," JAC22, Susan Searls Giroux, "The Post-9f11 University and the Project of Democracy," JAC 22, Recipients Henry A. Giroux, "Private Satisfactions and Public Disorders: Fight Club, Patriarchy, and the Politics of Masculine Violence," JAC 21, Thomas Rickert, "'Hands Up, You're Free': Composition in a Post Oedipal World," JAC 21, Recipients John Trimbur, "Agency and the Death of the Author: A Partial Defense of Modernism," JAC 20, Michael Bernard-DonaIs, "Ethos, Witness, and Holocaust 'Testimony': The Rhetoric of Fragments," JAC 20, Recipient D. Diane Davis, '" Addicted to Love'; Or, Toward an Inessential Solidarity," JAC 19,

8 1998 Recipient Susan C. Jarratt, "Beside Ourselves: Rhetoric and Representation in Postcolonial Feminist Writing," JAC 18, Recipients Bruce McComiskey, "Social-Process Rhetorical Inquiry: Cultural Studies Methodologies for Critical Writing about Advertisements," JAC 17, Honorable Mention: Pamela K. Gilbert, "Meditations upon Hypertext: A Rhetorethics for Cyborgs," JA C 17, Recipients Richard E. Miller, "What Does It Mean to Learn? William Bennett, the Educational Testing Service, and a Praxis of the Sublime," JAC 16, Honorable Mention: Nancy Welch, "Worlds in the Making: The Literacy Project as Potential Space," JAC 16, Recipient David W. Smit, "Hall of Mirrors: Antifoundationalist Theory and the Teaching of Writing," JAC 15, Recipient George L. Pullman, "Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature," JAC 14, Recipients Michael Murphy, "After Progressivism: Modem Composition, Institutional Service, and Cultural Studies," JAC 13, Honorable Mention: John Trimbur, "Articulation Theory and the Problem of Determination: A Reading of Lives on the Boundary," JAC 13, Recipient Jasper Neel, "Dichotomy, Con substantiality, Technical Writing, Literary Theory: The Double Orthodox Curse," JAC 12,

9 1991 Recipients Patricia A. Sullivan, "Writing in the Graduate Curriculum: Literary Criticism as Composition," JAC 11, Honorable Mention: Joseph Petraglia, "Interrupting the Conversation: The Constructionist Dialogue in Composition," JAC 11, Recipients Joy S. Ritchie, "Confronting the 'Essential' Problem: Reconnecting Feminist Theory and Pedagogy," JAC 10, Honorable Mention: Richard M. Coe, "Defining Rhetoric-and Us," JAC 10, Recipient David Bleich, "Genders of Writing," JAC 9, Recipients Reed Way Dasenbrock, "Becoming Aware of the Myth of Presence," JAC 8,1-11. Honorable Mention: William A. Covino, "Defining Advanced Composition: Contributions from the History of Rhetoric," JAC 8,