Celia Jameson
Women, brainwashing and the “turn to affect”
My project is a genealogy of brainwashing and associated models of coercive persuasion and traumatic bonding which emerged from the 1950s to the 70s, predominantly in the United States. I trace how these frameworks, which draw on crowd and group psychology, trauma theory, behaviourism and cybernetics, have been taken up within feminist and self help discourse on abusive relationships, and in recent media framing of abducted girls and women, who are understood as victims of brainwashing, the Stockholm syndrome and cult-like forms of coercion and influence.
I bring these assumptions of a specifically female openness to non-conscious, affective forms of communication into critical dialogue with current debates on affect and affective communication within social and cultural theory. I argue that genealogical work focussing on the above historical models of affective communication and transfer calls attention to some of the problems and issues which arise when openness to affect is celebrated as key to new modes of subjectivity.
Select conferences/symposia
2007, “The Subject of Influence: Brainwashing and Suggestion in Psychoanalysis, Sociology and Neurology”, History of Psychiatry and Psychology Research Seminar, Wellcome Trust Centre UCL.
2009 “Hope as Pathology: A Genealogy of the Stockholm Syndrome”, Hope: A Workshop on Feminist Theory, Lancaster University.
2009 “The Stockholm Syndrome, Psychoanalysis and Intersubjectivity”, Psychoanalysis Culture and Society, Postgraduate Conference, Middlesex University.
Participated in the Seminar Series “Researching Affect and Affective Communication”, Cardiff University, 2009-2010 (ESRC Centre for Research Methods, Networks for Methodological Innovation).
Forthcoming November 2011: “‘Edward Cullen is a Controlling and Abusive Boyfriend’: Twilight and the Discourse of Control and Coercion in Heterosexual Relationships”, Vampires: Myths of the Past and the Future, Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London.
Publications
2010 “The short step from love to hypnosis: a reconsideration of the Stockholm syndrome” Journal for Cultural Research Vol. 14, Issue 4, published as a book chapter in Hope and Feminist Theory (2011) (Eds) Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferreday, Taylor and Francis.
Biopolitics and the Homonormative Subject (Review Essay on Jasbir K. Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages) in Parallax Vol. 16, Issue 1, 2010.
“Samantha Donnelly” essay in The Shape We’re In exhibition catalogue, Zabludowicz Art Projects, 2011.