![]() I read within these Barbadian desires (and even within their disappointments) a profound optimism, pleasure, and bold self-discovery that does not only/always succumb to despair. In a society known more for its conservative 'stiff-upper lip' and 'grin-and-bear-it' demeanor, 'tough love,' and material, transactional modes of support and exchange than expressions of intimate affection, I chart a growing desire for new modes of feeling, a growing cultural pull toward romantic love and intimacy, and emotional expressivity itself. I turn to the specific context of the post-colonial Caribbean island of Barbados, where a new surge in desires for intimacy, emotional expressiveness, and affective life is bound up within the 21 st century thrust of neoliberal entrepreneurialism. In this essay, I suggest that feminist ethnographic analysis requires a more complex account of affective pursuits. Strikingly, feminist affect theory in particular interprets a fundamental cruelty at the core of cultural demands for optimism (Berlant 2011) or happiness (Ahmed 2010), a dark underbelly that forecloses any other transformative outcomes. Yet much of the scholarship on neoliberalism has focused squarely upon the extractive and exhausting quality of contemporary affective life. Indeed, the intensity with which feelings traverse these boundaries of individual-social-cultural-political-economic life is arguably a defining feature of our times. Positive feelings are also increasingly demanded and exchanged in the capitalist marketplace, including care and empathy, tenderness and affection. Anger, disgust, and anxiety abound in the public sphere and in social analyses. We use Berlant as a point of departure to both interrogate practices of self‐management and find possibilities for a collective response to the moments in which we find ourselves caught. These accounts take the form of three vignettes, each inflected by the specificities of our different positions and histories of becoming academics. In labouring to consolidate relationships and practices that hold the promise of our own sustainability, we give accounts of the material and affective work we perform to constitute what Berlant calls an intimate public, a collective space of mediation that functions as a key tactic to manage our academic life. As queer academics we expose the cruelty of our desires to live a good academic life, and we do so from our different positions as postdoctoral fellow, tenured academic and PhD candidate. ![]() Cruel optimism, Berlant suggests, is a desire for something that undermines its own potentiality. Our response to the question ‘What is this moment we are caught in?’ is articulated through our collaborative reading of Berlant's (2011) Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). ![]()
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