02-04-2026

A Manual for Burning (Draft)

The archive is not merely an institution, but a political body. So how, as someone who conducts research, do I locate emotion, affect and my own body in this realm? In Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology (1989), Alison M. Jaggar argues, in response to something she identifies as ‘the myth of dispassionate investigation’, that emotion is integral to evaluation and observation. Emotions are not obstacles to knowledge, she writes, but constitutive of knowing. The Western tradition, she notes, has tended to obscure the vital role of emotion in the construction of knowledge:

“Not only has reason,” she writes, “been contrasted with emotion, but it has also been associated with the mental, the cultural, the universal, the public and the male, whereas emotion has been associated with the irrational, the physical, the natural, the particular, the private and, of course, the female.” [1]

How do we authorize those, who were associated as ‘emotional’ and ‘irrational’ and therefore discredited as knowers, as authorized knowers too? I want to introduce Jaggar’s conceptualization of ‘outlaw emotion’ and secondly, I want to delve deeper into the issue of the archive as a site of cultural production, not particularly of knowledge, but of ignorance too. I do this, in order to argue, that the archive as a site inquiry and power must be subjected to anger, rage and turmoil. 

Feminist epistemologies have voiced their concerns regarding the myths and biases involved with knowledge production, be it academic or not. As scientific enquiry is not free from the social realm, the question of science must inevitably be a question of social relations and power. Feminist scholars have shown that androcentric assumptions have influenced all aspects of research, from the formulation of questions and hypotheses to the collection, analysis and interpretation.[2] This theoretical and conceptual reflection began with Marxist positions, psychoanalytically influenced approaches, and also from a sociology of the margins and ‘marginalized’ (i.e. women), as represented, for example, by Sandra Harding, Merrill B. Hintikka (eds.), Discovering Reality, Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science 1983, in which Nancy Hartstock published “The Feminist Standpoint: Foundations of a Specific Feminist Historical Materialism.” Another addition to this genesis of feminist critique of scientific enquiry, where the endgoal is not an abolition of objectivity or reason, but a more nuanced understanding how these categories came to be and how they by its structure exercise power over those not thought of or included in, is Alison M. Jaggars article published in 1983 and her idea of ‘outlaw emotions’. Jaggar introduced in her essay the idea of outlaw emotions, which she describes as emotions that might be seen as ‘inappropriate’ and that “are distinguished by their incompatibility with the dominant perceptions and values.” Jaggar states that there is something such as ‘emotional hegemony’ in order to argue that there is something such as ‘emotional subversion’.  (...) 

[1] Jaggar, Alison M. 1989. “Love and Knowledge: Emotion in Feminist Epistemology.” Inquiry 32 (2): 151–176. https://doi.org/10.1080/00201748908602185. 

[2] Cf. Feministische Epistemologien, S. 13f.