Annukka Lahti attended to a Psychosocial Studies conference in London
Annukka Lahti attended to a joint conference of the Association for Psychosocial Studies and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society: Learning or not learning from experience: Psychosocial approaches to researching and experiential learning in St Mary’s University, London.
Annukka presented based on a manuscript under review for the Special Issue on Queer Grief in lambda nordica. Her presentation was titled Grieving the multiple losses of LGBTIAQ+ break-ups – combining affect theorical and psychosocial perspectives
ABSTRACT
The article addresses a topic that is seldom discussed in public or research: grief over LGBTIQ+ people’s breakups. By attuning its analysis to queer grief as it is sensed, lived and entangled in multiple grief assemblages, this article goes beyond current frameworks for understanding LGBTIQ+ breakups, which often take structural and legal problems as a starting point. The article advances and develops an affect-theoretical approach to grief over LGBTIQ+ breakups. Highlighting the multiplicity of queer grief assemblages, it shows how various elements—human, nonhuman, psychic, cultural and spatial—are entangled in queer grief assemblages, alleviating and/or complicating the grieving process.
Thirty interviews with Finnish LGBTIQ+ people who have experienced relationship breakups are analysed. Following Deleuzian research methodologies, the analysis is intended to identify various elements and relations within queer grief assemblages, through which flows, blockages and accumulations of grief emerge. In these grief assemblages, affective intensities often condense around grief for the loss of one’s partner, but the assemblages always extend beyond this to include other people and ideological, spatial, material and psychic elements. Rather than contributing to the most intensive affective peaks within the grief assemblages, heteronormative elements often intensify grief by entangling painful past experiences, which puncture the flow of grief in the present, or preventing grief assemblages from extending out from the personal/private sphere and into the public.
