This article takes as its focus a politics of affect and its potentially transformative effects. Drawing on feminist new materialism and the process philosophy of Deleuze, I map moments in which this politics is enacted as school children encounter museum exhibits designed to address issues of class and race. Taking affect to be a matter of the capacity of bodies to affect and be affected, I attend to how the body's power of acting is increased or diminished through these encounters. Affect emerges as central to negotiations around issues relating to class and race, with some assemblages produced being particularly able to effect changes in capacities. Politics presents as a process of affective encounter through which dominant cultural norms of class and race can be contested and their exclusions ‘undone’. The argument is made that a politics of affect has the potential to unsettle normative power relations and address issues of social inequality and do so in an affirmative way. And, that attending to affect extends identity-based framings of class and race by bringing the constitutive role and contribution of the material, the micropolitical and the radically relational into view.

本文以情感政治及其潜在的变革效果为重点。借鉴女权主义的新唯物主义和德勒兹的过程哲学，我描绘了当小学生遇到旨在解决阶级和种族问题的博物馆展品时制定这种政治的时刻。考虑到情感是身体影响和受到影响的能力的问题，我研究了如何通过这些相遇来增强或减弱身体的行为能力。情感成为围绕阶级和种族问题进行谈判的中心，产生的某些集合特别能够影响能力的变化。政治是情感交流的过程，通过这种过程，人们可以对阶级和种族的主流文化规范进行争辩，而对他们的排斥则“撤消”。有人认为，情感政治有可能动摇规范的权力关系并解决社会不平等问题，并且可以肯定地这样做。并且，通过考虑物质的构成作用和贡献，微观政治和根本关系，来影响人们的参与扩展了基于身份的阶级和种族框架。