In “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” José Esteban Muñoz writes about depression, or what he calls “the depressive position,” as an affect/ive position. His articulation of “brown feelings… chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don't feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.”¹ Muñoz's contribution to conversations about affect and affective “particularity and belonging” is to ask us to pay attention to feelings and positionings, rather than identity categories and developmental discourses of normativity. He writes:

Affect is not meant to be a simple placeholder for identity in my work. Indeed, it is supposed to be something altogether different; it is, instead, supposed to be descriptive of the receptors we use to hear each other and the frequencies on which certain subalterns speak and are heard or, more importantly, felt.²

The articles in this issue of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (Departures) resonate with Muñoz's focus on feelings and positionings, articulating in “narratives of being and belonging” affective portraits of academic depression among queer faculty of color, the microaggressions, and the workings of difference set against an assumed (hetero)normativity in organizational relationships and collaborations within the academy, and appeals for biodiverse and non-normative understandings of individuals living and relating on and along the autism spectrum. Each essay works to performatively and affectively create the state of living and feeling depression, difference, and diagnosis, challenging the limitations and violence of normative discourses from a diverse array of theoretical vantage points. Collectively, the essays in this issue create a “reparative performance” that “allows a certain level of social recognition.”³

Inspired by the hashtag #realacademicbios, a space for exploring the complex and all too often oppressive understandings and experiences of academic life from multiple perspectives, Bernadette Marie Calafell's poem “When Depression Is in the Job Description #realacademicbios” powerfully performs the feelings and doings of queer academics of color. Taking up the discussion of systemic and systematic racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and ableism in academia, Calafell paints a concrete and specific portrait of what it feels like to move in and through racial battle fatigue, mirco- and macroagressions, antifeminist and anti-intersectional critiques, and questions of imposter syndrome as a queer faculty and administrator of color in the neoliberal academy. Her piece performs a brown modality of depression that shatters and displaces narratives of (academic) wholeness and happiness and imagines “a mode of brown politics not invested in the narrative of a whole and well-adjusted subject.”⁴

Tim McKenna-Buchanan's “It's Not All ‘One’ Story” and Lisbeth Frølunde, Christina Hee Pedersen, and Martin Novak's “Unravelling the Workings of Difference in Collaborative Inquiry” offer detailed narrative explorations of the workings of microagressions, silencing discourses, and difference, demonstrating both the necessity and the reparative power of leaving “the realm of muteness” and attaining “a valuable ‘articulated syntactic particularity’ that is tuned to group identification.”⁵ McKenna-Buchanan considers the workings of heternormativity in organizational contexts, focusing our attention not only on the institutional silencing and oppression that heteronormative discourses instantiate and enforce, but also on the subtle yet no less damaging emotional toll such discourses take on lesbian and gay people living, working, and feeling within such institutions. Frølunde, Hee Pedersen, and Novak narrate the experience of navigating collaborative working relationships within in the academy, calling attention to the ongoing and complex microprocesses of inclusion and exclusion that take place along multiple sites of difference. Both essays speak to what Muñoz describes as “antinormative feelings that correspond to minoritarian becoming” and offer us narratives that help us understand how “circuits of belonging” connect in the flash of “recognition [that] flickers between minoritarian subjects.”⁶

The next two essays offer layered accounts of living on the autism spectrum modeled on Carol Rambo Ronai's articulation of the performative writing method, which seeks to integrate “theoretical thinking, introspection, emotional experience, fantasies, dreams, and statistics” and to write the simultaneously retrospective, participatory, and personal of both research and experience.⁷ Jacob Abraham's “(Dis)engaging with Asperger's” writes Asperger's not as a spoiled or stigmatized identity, but rather as a neurodiverse way of feeling and relating. In and through the chronicling of the evolution of new interpersonal relationships, Abraham works to tell his understandings of Asperger's as a narrative that frames the austistic mind on a spectrum of difference, one that provides a counterpoint to the dominant, neurotypcial discourses about what feelings, relational experiences, knowledges, and concepts constitute the self. Vigdis Stokker Jensen's “Performing Autism through a Layered Account” explores the experience of time and space for people diagnosed with autism as both emergent and inventive. Jensen contrasts normative approaches to both time (chrononormativity) and space (toponormativity) in a psych education class for adults with an autism diagnosis. She argues that non-chrono-topo-normative online spaces designed by and for people with autism diagnoses afford an ability to create self-governed, transactional, and responsive relationships with their psychosocial environments. Neither essay avoids or elides the difficult and painful social and emotional toll of relating in/as someone living on the autism spectrum; both authors articulate the positioning of Asperger's and autism as “provisional and flexible demarcations, practices of being”⁸ rather than rigid, heteronormative, and teleological psychosocial developmental discourses.

The final essay in this issue, Sarah M. Parsloe's “Dialogue with a Diary and a Diarist,” chronicles the exchanges she had with Paul—an autistic collaborator in a research project—through a series of diary entries he created and shared. Whereas Parsloe's work contributed to portraits of members of the autism community as neurodiverse, agentic, and empowering, her relationship and dialogue with Paul demanded that she also attend to the feelings of brokenness and misunderstanding that people living on the autism spectrum experience. By engaging in what Muñoz terms “weak theor[izing],” a “provisional and heuristic approach”⁹ designed to create social recognition through dialogic exchange, Parlsoe resists the totalizing and prescriptive tendencies of posAutivity discourses of self and diagnosis. Instead, she writes toward an emergent, relational, and feeling-centered positioning of self.

The essays in this issue of Departures ask us to notice, in Muñoz's terms, how different “circuits of belonging connect,”¹⁰ and how minoritarian subjects perform, function, and feel things within a majoritarian sphere. Collectively, the pieces explore the non-normative positions of depression, difference, and diagnosis as reparative performances. Muñoz builds his discussion of reparative performances on Melanie Klein's writing about the drive to make reparations as a “response to feelings of grief, guilt and fear of loss.”¹¹ Whereas some are triumphal (inverting normalizing hierarchies and swapping one person's or group's stigmatization for another's) and others engage in a kind of placating magical thinking, Muñoz's consideration of the depressive position performs reparation as grounded in “love for the object.”¹² Such gestures present a “kind of striving for belonging that does not ignore the various obstacles that the subject must overcome” to achieve it, even provisionally.¹³ This issue of Departures offers us work that meditates on “particularities, both shared and divergent… that are central to the choreography of self and other.”¹⁴

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