Dis/comforts

This chapter takes dis/comfort—the entangling of comfort and discomfort—as its central object of study: a mode or network of feelings and/or affects that have dominated my sense of literary studies and the university in recent years. I attend to, after Kathleen Stewart and others, ‘ordinary affects’, those affects which occur in, shape, and produce the everyday. The chapter looks at how teaching ‘diverse’ literary texts is entangled with a range of other issues and problems about what we teach and how we teach it. Examining how the study of queer writers and writers of colour is connected calls for diversification and decolonisation, to safe spaces and content notes/trigger warnings, and to privilege, this chapter traces dis/comforts. In short, one’s comfort often relies on another’s discomfort, and vice versa; the chapter asks how we sit with, and manage, that interrelation of complex feelings and their attendant affects.