ABSTRACT

In this article, we draw on interview data with three Vietnamese women to explore how categorical difference works through the ways that these women constitute themselves and are constituted as academics and doctoral students in Australian universities. Our analysis focuses on the arrangement of things that make neoliberalism an inexhaustive force, working via affective connections with other social, historical and material conditions in producing differences. Drawing on the Deleuzian concept of assemblage and contemporary feminist views of affect, we map moments when things come together via their affective capacities to produce identity categories, structures, binaries and power relations in Australian neoliberal universities. Our theorisation of categorical difference as affective assemblage is helpful in understanding the production of differences as affective arrangements of matter and meaning that are linked not only to contemporary neoliberal practices and regimes but also to historical pasts that are often Eurocentric, racialised and conventionally gendered. Given that the categorical difference is affective and contingent, we suggest that it can be surmounted when any of us, at any moment, can affect others via our capacities to think outside ordered systems no matter how powerful they might be in the thoughts of those engaged.

摘要

在本文中，我们利用对三名越南女性的采访数据来探索类别差异如何通过这些女性构成自己以及在澳大利亚大学中作为学者和博士生的构成方式发挥作用。我们的分析侧重于使新自由主义成为一种无穷无尽的力量的事物的安排，通过与其他社会、历史和物质条件的情感联系来产生差异。借鉴德勒兹的集合概念和当代女权主义情感观点，我们绘制了澳大利亚新自由主义大学中事物通过情感能力产生身份类别、结构、二元和权力关系的时刻。我们将分类差异理论化为情感集合有助于理解差异的产生是物质和意义的情感安排，这些安排不仅与当代新自由主义实践和制度有关，而且与通常以欧洲为中心、种族化和传统性别化的历史过去有关。鉴于类别差异是情感性和偶然性的，我们建议当我们中的任何人在任何时候都可以通过我们在有序系统之外思考的能力影响他人时，无论他们在那些参与的人的思想中可能多么强大，它都可以被克服.