Alana Brekelmans

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I’m anthropologist, and research and teach at the University of Queensland. My research interests include:

Time and place
Memory
Narrative
Settler colonialism
Indigenous Australia
Affect
Environmental perception

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‘Maybe I could rewrite the fairy tale of my life, transforming every blow to the head, and every cut to the cunt, and every crucified doll into some kind of an initiation.’

‘The ordinary is, after all, a porous zone that absorbs lots of incoherence and contradiction, and people make their ways through it at once tipped over awkwardly, half conscious, and confident about common sense. Laws, norms, and events shape imaginative, but in the middle of our reproduction of life people make up modes of being and responding to the world that altogether constitute what gets called ‘visceral response’ and intuitive intelligence’

‘It is significant that the word ‘passion’ and the word ‘passive’ share the same root in the Latin word for ‘suffering’ (passio). To be passive is to be enacted upon, as a negation that is already felt as suffering. The fear of passivity is tied to the fear of emotionality, in which weakness is defined in terms of a tendency to be shaped by others. Softness is narrated as a proneness to injury. The association between passion and passivity is instructive. It works as a reminder of how ‘emotion’ has been viewed as ‘beneath’ the faculties of thought and reason. To be emotional is to have one’s judgement affected: it is to be reactive rather than active, dependent rather than autonomous. Feminist philosophers have shown us how the subordination of emotions also works to subordinate the feminine and the body...it is not difficult to see how emotions are bound up with the securing of social hierarchy: emotions become attributes of bodies as a way of transforming what is ‘lower’ or ‘higher’ into bodily traits’.

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