EXHAUSTING AFFECTS: THE NEGOTIATION OF AFFECTIVE LABOUR, NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTIVITY, AND FEMINIST POLITICS AMONG ANTI-VIOLENCE WORKERS

This thesis explores the affective and political life of anti-violence labour, with particular attention to the ways that neoliberalism comes to bear on subjectivity, embodiment, and relationality among women responding to violence. In fall of 2015, I conducted qualitative interviews with six women engaged in the work of responding to violence. The participants in this project articulated rich descriptions of the affective life of neoliberalism and the demands of neoliberal subjectivity, drawing particular attention to the affective labour involved in navigating the political complexities of anti-violence organizations, negotiating burnout, and affectively self-managing in order to meet norms of professionalism. Bringing participant narratives into conversations with feminist theories of affect, I argue for an account affective labour that centers the specific, materially embodied experiences of that work and for an account of neoliberalism as a system of embodied and affective pressures.

Degeneracy of velocity constraints in rigid body systems

The equations governing the dynamics of rigid body systems with velocity constraints are singular at degenerate configurations in the constraint distribution. In this report, we describe the causes of singularities in the constraint distribution of interconnected rigid body systems with smooth configuration manifolds. A convention of defining primary velocity constraints in terms of orthogonal complements of one-dimensional subspaces is introduced. Using this convention, linear maps are defined and used to describe the space of allowable velocities of a rigid body. Through the definition of these maps, we present a condition for non-degeneracy of velocity constraints in terms of the one dimensional subspaces defining the primary velocity constraints. A method for defining the constraint subspace and distribution in terms of linear maps is presented. Using these maps, the constraint distribution is shown to be singular at configuration where there is an increase in its dimension.