Affectively Laden Scenes of Suffering: Narratives of Compassionate Intervention, Empathetic Identification and Sympathetic Agency

Abstract

This dissertation examines compassionate interventions, empathetic identifications, and acts of sympathetic agency that are performed under the presumption of ameliorating the pain of (an)other. These performances index an uneven relationship between a feeling subject who witnesses the pain of (an)other, and the object of suffering who experiences their pain made public in a sensational scene of suffering. Drawing on an archive of primary materials, including, John Lee Hancock’s film The Blind Side (2009a); Michael Dorris’ autobiographical text, The Broken Cord (1989); and the pedagogical material belonging to a University of Pennsylvania professor and Penn Museum curator Janet Monge (2015-2019) I interrogate how these affective responses, of being moved to act on behalf of (an)other, are mobilized in inspiring, as well as in sometimes contradictory and often also problematic ways. Each of these texts features a central protagonist that either operationalizes the suffering of a child, imagined imperiled future fetal children, or the remains of deceased children, to perform their benevolent intervention. While the texts narrate these as extraordinary acts of kindness, as I will demonstrate, each ignores how the interventions of the protagonist constitutes an encroachment of power that not only causes more harm, but also effaces the object of suffering whose pain made public serves primarily to bolster their exceptionalism. The feeling subject, I will show, not only acquires coherence and legibility through the scene of suffering itself, but in fact requires it. Utilizing theories and methods from Affect Studies, Cultural Studies, and Feminist Studies, I consider and address how gender, sexuality, race, disability, and in particular antiblackness, gives shape to the uneven geography between the feeling subject and the object of suffering. This research reveals how affective responses to scenes of suffering, while well intentioned can reproduce the very harms they intend to ameliorate.