Registering Experience

Fundamental to any knowledge project seeking to intervene in identity-based oppression is a need to emplace the personal and the social in ways that are both emotionally and politically sustaining. Situating feminism in a long line of struggle to see and experience the world differently, this chapter considers how online feminist knowledge cultures could rearticulate experience in ways that enabled young feminists to grapple with the structural inequalities that appeared in their lives. Drawing together the work of Nira Yuval-Davis on the transversal gaze with an important body of feminist work on affect, the chapter argues that collective orientations could be fostered by attention to the minutiae of everyday life. It highlights the possibilities of affective movements between the specific and the generic, rather than through the adoption of particular concepts themselves.