Working the Affect Shift

Book excerpt: Working the Affect Shift explores the changing U.S. racial and political economic context of Latina working-class film and media images, and how Ethnic, Cultural, Film, and Feminist Studies have contributed to sociologically understanding them. We can rethink our orientation to so-called "stereotypes" by focusing on our forward-looking, positive neoliberal ideology as related to our "national forgetting of collective racial injury." Each film and media image analyzed herein offers an example of how the fraught relational matrices of race, class, gender, and sexual identities continue to shape national politics despite our national commitment (on the political Right and Left) to "multiculturalism." Using Latina service workers as examples, this volume offers ways to think productively toward re-shaping our national identity by envisioning change without negating historical injuries suffered by both minorities and whites, males and females.