Feminist affect and children's embodied trauma

Feminist new materialisms account for the agency of the body and the ways it is entangled with, in and through its environment. Similarly, affect scholars have put words to the bodily feelings and attunements that we can’t describe. In this paper, we provide a brief survey of feminist thought that established the scholarly landscape and appetite for the turn to affect and offer this as a theoretical tool for thinking through the child body. Feminist affect is used here as a resource for understanding embodied change in children who are living with intergenerational trauma. Through analysing data from the Interfaith Childhoods project, we explore art as a way to affectively rework trauma in three case studies with refugee children from our Australian fieldwork sites. Our new materialist arts based approaches map embodied changes in children that speak to how bodies inherit and are affected by things that often can’t be described. Specifically, in relation to their religious, cultural and refugee histories (Van der Kolk 2014, Menakem 2017), we offer the analysis in this paper as a route towards understanding children’s bodily experience and expression, in ways that have been made possible by affective lines of inquiry pioneered by feminist scholarship.


Introduction
Affects are movements that can change people. Produced by assemblages connecting bodies, contexts and objects, affects are the result of more-than-human connections: art materials, times of making and collaborating, ways of presenting and being received. Affects are bigger than the people they change. Above, Abigail Kluchin explains affect as the intensity that no one body is able to own; the empirical and emotional mixture we don't have a feeling or proper noun to describe, the in-between zone of things that makes us question boundaries between knowledges, bodies, practices. Shifting shapes and locations, affect escapes language but can also be in language. As such, affect can be transgressive: leaking between bodies and ideas and showing up the edges of 'thought'. Embodied histories and knowledges live on for generations in affect, and as such, affect is also often the medium for maintaining or resolving generational trauma, memory and biography. Affect can reproduce and enforce existing hierarchies of power through looks of distaste, through suggestion, through praise, through a disapproving raised eyebrow. Its power is partly derived from the unacknowledged, often unconscious ways that affect works: it changes states of affairs and then minds follow.
Feminist theory has long been interested in the body as a site of transgression, attuned to a myriad of practices of epistemic and corporeal boundary crossing, creating ways of mapping the un-nameable. Such content includes unspoken but effective/affective power dynamics, the non-verbal exchange of information, and spatial and structural inequalities. What is now called 'affect theory' is concerned with discussing matters that had, until the late 90s and early 2000s, been the preserve of feminist theory.
Indeed the "turn to affect" (Clough & Halley, 2007) or "affective turn" (Cvetkovich, 2012), as it has been characterized, has predominantly been concerned with building on the work of male theorists who advance arguments that have implicit, uncited relationships to feminist theory. While there have been efforts to produce feminist genealogies that recognize the often undercited and uncredited work of woman thinkers (see, for example, van der Tuin, 2009van der Tuin, , 2016Buhlmann et al., 2017), citational practices that acknowledge the feminist history of the subjects of affect studies have not been comprehensively taken up within the field. Redressing this issue, we use the idea of 'feminist affect' as a way of thinking through the child body to understand embodied changes that are prompted through art practice.

Method and methodology
As a methodology, thinking through feminist affect to read the child body requires acknowledging corporeal agency and the complex temporalities this brings with it.
Children are born with the histories of their parents' and their forebears' imprinted in the matter of their bodies (Haines, 2019). Children's bodies speak for them, but also speak of their families' and their own inherited histories (Menakem, 2017). This approach is put into action through the Interfaith Childhoods research project methods, which work with art and embodied affect to understand children's expression of themselves, their identity, faith, community and belonging. Interfaith Childhoods works with schools, communities and religious organizations to collect and share stories of everyday life told by secular people and those of faith in Australia and the U.K.
This large empirical research project, which we discuss in greater detail later on, has a number of research participants who speak languages other than English, but the images they create communicate affectively, regardless of language. Through new materialist ethnographic work, we look for everyday stories and experiences of belonging that emerge through a collaborative art making process. These experiences are shared through images, words, memory, allegory and collaborative exchanges.
Reading the child body, making together and observing bodily responses is a way of creating space to recognize subjugated, non-mainstream knowledges. Making art with culturally and linguistically diverse children and talking to their parents is an everyday, vernacular, decolonializing approach to a feminist affect. Our approach is concerned with the agency of experience, of places, matter and things.
Interfaith Childhoods has 13 fieldwork sites and over 500 participants. Through new materialist arts workshops with children aged 5-12, we explore how children and their parents feel they belong (or do not belong) to Australia or the UK, and to their religious, ethnic and cultural identities. Art making and focus group conversations with parents form a complex enmeshment of stories, symbols and styles of attachment emerge.
This data needs to be read through bodily experiences of, migration, war, trauma, increase or a decrease in the capacity to act of a given assemblage (a body, object, or network)1. This method of thinking carries on in the work of many others (e.g. Massumi 1995) and can be characterized as a canon.
Other popular resources for working with the concept of affect include Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, Moira Gatens, Marie Luise Angerer, Gregory Seigworth, Bernd Bosel, Patricia Clough, Brian Ott, Elspeth Probyn. Tomkins (1962Tomkins ( , 1984Tomkins ( , 1992 defines affect in a much more psychologically aligned (or human-centric) way than Spinoza or Deleuze. For Tomkins, affect is also the innate, biological response to the increasing, or decreasing, of neural firing. This can be read as a biological and anthropomorphized way of saying that affect is an increase or decrease in capacity to act. Awareness of an affect is a feeling, and a feeling in combination with a memory of prior similar feelings, is an emotion. Out of awareness, we develop 'rules' that we use to achieve more positive and less negative affect. Tomkins calls these "scripts". The pattern of scripts that a person uses to modulate affect constitutes their personality. Epigenetics (Youdell 2016) and trauma studies (Van Der Kolk, 2014;Menaken, 2017;Herman 1992;Miller et al., 2020) (Bergson 1988) is a key text in which Bergson links cognition and affect. He defines affect as "that part or aspect of the inside of our bodies which mix with the image of external bodies" (1988, p. 60). This 'part or aspect' is necessarily produced by perception and "there is no perception without affection" (1988, p. 60). Again, we see a link between the 'outside' and 'inside' of a person: affect is a process of mediation, and a process of change. Massumi (19 95) derives his idea of affect from the theorists cited above. He draws on Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, and Guattari to develop relationships between intensities that escape coding as being singularly psychological, or singularly emotional, and he writes about such intensities as affects. For Massumi, affect is "the edge of virtual, where it leaks into the actual, that counts ... It is beyond infrastructural. It is transversal" (1995, p. 105, 107). Affect activates materiality through embodying new connections and machining the possibilities that come with these enmeshments. Bringing the actual into the virtual is affect's utility.
An openness to working with a biosocial reading of the body that takes the physiological aspects of affective processes seriously informs our method and approach to 'feminist affect'. Youdell explores how epigenetics, sociology, pedagogy, and molecular biology might come together to enable biosocial orientation in education. Epigentics, the study of gene expression, looks at "the plasticity of the brain's epigenetic responses to environment and experience" (Youdell, 2016, p. 57).
Youdell points to studies that look at biochemical changes in the brain in relation to changing environments, affects, and situational knowledges, in order to theorize how children learn, the relationships between the child, body, memory and community.
Pointing to the molecular ways humans are changed by what and whom they see, Youdell (2016)

Feminist affect
Before the 'turn to affect' (Clough & Halley, 2007), there was feminism, which created an appetite to think through the body (Gallop, 1990) and legitimized embodied knowledges. We offer a gallery-style tour through the work of some contemporary theorists of feminist affect in order to show that the scholarship on affect canvassed above has parallels with a feminist canon. Thinking with feminist affect, we have the opportunity to open up more pathways that acknowledge the body as a site of labour, embodied history and political action. Valerie Walkerdine was crucial in creating a scholarly climate that values embodied histories and knowledges, and this culture of thought is key to the uptake of affect theory. Here we look at Walkerdine's recent writing, but also consider her earlier research a significant precursor to contemporary work on affect, as Walkerdine developed spaces for exploring psycho-social transference now occupied by affect theory. Walkerdine's article (2016) "Affective history, working-class communities and self-determination" develops a useful concept of affective history, exploring "the common creation of everyday being-ness, producing … meanings that may have existed and been passed down over hundreds of years" (p. 699). Her psychosocial history of class provides tools for understanding affective structures of feeling that extend beyond class strata, to include the intersectionality of race, gender, sex, place, and other significant factors. Walkerdine (2017) further develops her psychosocial affective history to think beyond class, into the ways it emerges through struggle, resilience and aspiration. She argues that: "the great class divide … has to be understood in terms of the psychosocial affective history of its production" (2017, p. 6).2 This history of class production is foundational in considering the ways children are produced and read as classed, and their responses to this positionality. We draw on Walkerdine's thought below in considering the ways two refugee boys from a council estate acted out against the classed nature of their geographic position. 8 Lisa Blackman's (2015) "Affective politics, debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering" provides a significant resource for those thinking about how affect shapes our social worlds3. As an intervention within queer and feminist debates that have re-posed negative ways of being, Blackman (2015) suggests that feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between affect, feeling and politics will offer new strategies of survival in capitalist countries. Blackman's vision importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. We also argue for a feminist reading of affect theory that accounts for the dissociative bodily affects of adults and children, and draw on Blackman's work in order to think about the detached persona of a refugee mother who has survived the Bosnian war.
In "De-colonizing empathy: thinking affect transnationally", Carolyn Pedwell (2016) "examines empathy's dynamic relationships to transnational processes of location, translation, imagination and attunement" (p. 29). Pedwell argues we need to pay attention to the ways in which feelings travel, and the political implications of such mobility needs to be combined with attention to the significance of contingent social and geo-political location and positionality. … embodied location and geo-political context matter to the production of affect, to the particular ways in which empathy might work and gain significance. (2016, p.

46)
This attunement to the geopolitical politics of emotion is critical, especially as we are two white women working with children of colour from migrant and refugee backgrounds. We look to decentre colonial histories, knowledges and value systems, and also to develop an awareness of the global and racialized politics of emotion. The example of empathy that Pedwell mobilizes is useful, as empathetic engagement can be seen as a colonial trope applied to the black child. We try to create a middle ground which does not patronise refugee children by empathising with them, but also, arguably more unethical, does not urge towards simply observing or analysing their process. Reading and responding to their verbal and non-verbal communication, we are part of the assemblages through which they become.

Affect as a feminist politic and pedagogy
Hickey-Moody has written on affect as pedagogy (2013) Julia Coffey writes about 'body work' and the ways gender is ascribed, restructured and made through a Deleuzian analytic of 'becoming'. Coffey's (2013) article "Bodies, body work and gender: Exploring a Deleuzian approach" articulates how, through thinking with affect, "body work must be understood as embodied processes which move beyond binarized analyses of the body" (p.3). She argues that "body work practices can be more productively understood in this context: as processes (rather than a 'project') related to identity, and as a series of practices of negotiation among many that are meaningful to the ways bodies are lived" (p.7). Thinking within this frame, as bodies being events, Coffey contends that "the body is productive because it connects (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987); and a focus on these connections … bridges the gap between gender as a concept and as an embodied experience" (p.7). Coffey's work not only thinks through the body, it thinks through the ways the body is made in an interactive becoming within feminist research. She calls for further inquiry into feminist lines of affective thought which account for body work and practice4. We align with Coffey's position that the body is productive in its connections and this approach is evident in our analysis of children's processes of making below.
A substantive contribution to thinking about affect as pedagogical has also been made 1) The body as a site of labour, racialized and classed place of political action.
2) Power and politics as mediated through materiality and action.
3) Non-verbal communication as a significant method of expressing affect.
These three beliefs can be seen to unite feminist affect studies as a field. We now turn our focus to employing feminist affect to undertake analysis which thinks through the child's body, inherited trauma and their imaginary worlds.

The child body
Children and embodiment is to subject of much excellent new materialist work (Malone 2016;de Frietas and Sinclair, 2013). The racialized nature of children's bodies is a primary way they communicate, as Franklin-Phipps (2017, p.385) explains: The shifting ways that Black girls bodies can affect and be affected in relation to entering an assemblage is becoming. Becoming amplifies, makes space for noticing, and emphasizes what a girl can do in a given assemblage; it is a recognition that affective power is fluid even as it is mediated and constituted by race and gender … Becoming is not inherent in the girl, but a result of a variety of factors acting in concert to effect particular kinds of becomings for particular kinds of bodies. This way of thinking about girls is one of accounting for girls' agency without undermining or minimizing the structural forces that move and affect her.
As this quote makes plain, context matters. We need to think through how child's bodies express themselves, often unknowingly, in ways they can't often comprehend.
How does a child of a refugee background express fears of homelessness or displacement in relation to their past trauma of fleeing war? Through black scribbles?
Words often aren't enough. This is precisely why we have devoted this article to using feminist affect as a way of thinking through the child body. matters' and what 'belonging feels like'. We later stitched together the patches of material to make one large quilt. Amira drew about food, friends and her home in Syria.
As a refugee, when asked to draw about her home, or feelings about where she belonged, Amira drew buildings falling on people. In a nonchalant way, she asked us to google 'rubble' and 'fallen cities' to help her draw an image that represented her home. The talking bubble in blue says: "People are dying and buildings are falling".
The image of the woman wearing a hijab yelling "Help!" is her grandmother. Amira told us her grandmother still lived in Syria, and when the war was over, she wanted to go back to see her grandma, but right now her Grandmother's house had no roof (because of air raids) and that it wasn't safe. Amira's acclimatization to urban destruction and the war that caused it was presented through an "everyday beingness … that may have existed and been passed down" (Walkerdine, 2016, p. 699).
Amira's tastes in fashion and textiles also echo the histories of Syria's rich and refined textile industry. While she was sullen, shy and withdrawn the first day, by the second day she trusted us more and became expressive, decorating everything with coloured glitter. Blackman (2015) refers to changes such as this as "affective capacity [which] is bodily capacity and draws attention to the liveliness and materiality of matter and to processes taken to exceed and de-stabilise the primacy of cognition and conscious attention in theories of power (such as interpellation)" (p.35). On the final day of workshops, when we were meant to leave the school, Amira hugged us and made all of the workshop facilitators handbags out of paper stuffed with notes and drawings.
Amira wants to be a fashion designer when she grows up.
"Paper Handbags", Amira's thank you gift, Canberra 2019 Working with feminist affect as a way of thinking through Amira's lived experience as a refugee, her connection to food, family, and the war back home, we see that art practice offers only an entry point to navigate her feelings around these issues, but a way to consider how lived experiences and bodily affects play out on the page. The act of drawing and making expresses and uncovers embodied traumas through material engagement Ho, 2016, 2017;Rowe et al. 2017;Ugurlu 2016 Ajša could be one of the women whom Blackman describes as experiencing "worlds structured by inequalities and oppressions (racial, gendered, sexed and classed)" (2015, p.28) and her religion is clearly a necessary survival strategy needed "in order to endure" (2015, p.28 and asserts that "we find learning taken to be the making of memory, and memory taken as the biochemical changes in the brain that occur when something is learnt" Abdul and Caleb are first generation Australian boys from refugee families that fled Somalia and West Papua New Guinea before they were born. They live in the council housing block near the school. There is a class divide between those who live on the council housing estate and those who live in private housing in the area, while the housing estate serves a much needed purpose of providing shelter it also reinforces a class system: "the great class divide [that] opens up the possibility of a longing for expansion that not only has no economic possibility for expression but also equally has to be understood in terms of the psychosocial affective history of its production" (Walkerdine 2017 p. 6 During this set of workshops Caleb and Abdul started to grow disinterested, disruptive, they tried to speak out, act out and assert dominance over the group. Age played a factor, as they were 9-10 years old and clearly beginning to grow into what they saw as their gendered role: spreading out, taking up space, seeking attention. This act of 'performing boy' as Bohlmann and Hickey-Moody (2019) have argued elsewhere, is a way of understanding how "meaning becomes contingent rather than fixed. As a sign, the child enters into an assemblage with other signs where meaning is composed in relation to those other elements, affectively, temporarily and provisionally" (p.7).
Therefore, through the act of associating themselves with societal norms attributed to boys, children start to take up the gendered assemblages that surround them and assert these through performative acts. For the second week of workshops, we decided that Caleb and Abdul would do a different activity that was designed specifically to engage them in something they were more interested in: rapping. Caleb's mind map above also shows him charting out ideas around identity and belonging to create the lyrics to his rap, which speaks to his connection to his family's history and their escape from war. We looked at the ways Caleb expresses himself through acting out with his body, by being loud and taking up space. For his relatively small size, he asserts dominance and is actively growing into his learned black male subjectivity through rapping. However, in his rap about belonging, we noticed his body change as he spoke about his family's use of a boat to flee to safety. Caleb said they only had one minute to get their things. He grew quiet, small, retracted into himself remembering this experience. When he rapped the escape, you could barely hear his voice, which was a stark comparison to earlier in the workshop when his voice was the only one you could hear shouting for attention.
Through this rap on belonging and story about identity, culture and home, we witnessed and were a part of, Caleb's embodied change. Caleb charted his family's emotional and physical past through his rap and also through his everyday actions of embodying what it means to be a black boy in Melbourne's inner north. Reading the child's body and the associated economies of affect, of expansion, contraction and change, Caleb's rap lyrics and visual stories told through the quilt tiles he subsequently produced expressed his bodily affects. Materially expressing things that can be difficult to articulate (Hickey-Moody and Willcox, 2020), is a way of thinking through the affected states of the body, and in some instances, helps the body to think through the ways it can change. For after a day of workshopping that was separate to the remainder of the class, Caleb's eagerness to take part in the group activity made his outbursts much less frequent. His bodily reaction to both rapping about home, and to speaking out and asserting dominance over the group spoke to the many ways feminist affect can be used as a tool for thinking through the child's body, and its many expressions of bodily affect.

Conclusion
The generational trauma of fleeing ethnic and religious wars stays with families, in lived experiences of first generation children, and, as Sangalang and Vang (2017) point out "there is increased recognition that war-related post-traumatic stress extends beyond the individual to affect families, with potential long-term effects on the health and psychosocial well-being of individuals in subsequent generations" (p.745). The bodily affects of years of fear, violence and war can stay in cells. Our bodies remember.
Feminist new materialist and intersectional thinking is a significant resource for understanding these economies of embodied change. Often such change entails shifting intergenerational trauma through biosocial processes of learning. The scholars' work we have used in this analysis is united by an interest in the materiality of change, the politics of aesthetics, embodiment, and knowledge production. This concern with the embodied politics of knowledge production can be reframed as a challenge, or a question: How can we theorize the rich worlds of affective production through the history of feminist scholarship?
We would suggest that Iris van der Tuin (2014) (after Elizabeth Grosz) gives us a methodological answer to this question in arguing for feminist genealogy as a means for locating "the surprise for the future that we find in the past" (p. 10). A surprise of feminist futuring, in which women thinking with (and through) the work of other women, affects broader fields of scholarship and, in turn, informs the composition of the academy. May we be moved to change bodies of thought.
For Amira, Zoltar and Caleb, generational trauma descending through refugee families marks their art and their bodily affects. When talking about home and belonging, we think through the body, as it manifests certain ways of being that account for the body remembering trauma, war, searching for safety. Likewise, when making art about the