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Regret, a Conversation with Ann Cvetkovich

Ann Cvetkovich, Chis Bobel, and Laura Green

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Chris Bobel: It’s my great privilege to welcome you, Ann, to talk about the core topic that unites this special issue that Laura and I have been working on. We’re just so delighted to have you.  

Laura Green: I add my voice to Chris’s to say it’s a pleasure.  

Chris Bobel: We’re so grateful to have this chance to hear from you, clearly a leading feminist scholar of affect and the author of foundational texts that I know have been on my bookshelf for a long time, An Archive of Feelings and Depression: A Public Feeling, and, of course, your more current projects which were very keen to hear about. We’re hoping this conversation will help us think through regret in various ways, and to get us started, we have a very capacious question: How do you think about regret as potentially productive or generative in terms of meeting feminist agendas? That is, how might regret motivate change or actions on the way to change? 

Ann Cvetkovich: I love the question. I feel like I need to back up for a minute and just say that I’m excited to be able to think this through with you as we work in conversation together today. I haven’t quite sorted out all of my thoughts on this topic, but I’m excited to have an opportunity to do so through a conversational format. You’re working on the topic of regret, which I was very intrigued by when I first read your call for papers. I haven’t worked so much on specific emotions. I’ve thought about affect, emotion, and feeling in general. So I’m always very excited to see other specific key words or other emotions receive attention.   

A framework has developed that has definitely been important to me: can emotions that are often stigmatized or judged as negative or bad somehow be generative? That’s a formula in a sense, and I mean “formula” in a good way—a structure of feeling that I have thought about in relation to depression, and also in relation to trauma, which, if we want to move away from the clinical terms for both trauma and depression, would take us into the zone of sadness, melancholy, etc. I think it’s really interesting to think about where regret might stand alongside loss, melancholy, mourning, grief.  

Regret has a somewhat different flavor, even if it is in a cluster or family of key words that also sometimes get characterized, perhaps overgeneralized, as negative affects. One of the key moves of the kinds of affect theory I’ve been involved in has been to refuse binaries between good and bad feelings and to suggest that dwelling with bad feelings (and I think this is going to be key for our conversation about regret—sitting with bad feelings, not trying to move off of them too quickly) can be interesting and productive. Although we might want to not jump too quickly to the idea of generative, because people have challenged me, for example, on the speed with which we somehow reverse the binary and say, “Oh, it’s great. It’s wonderful,” when, in part, what we want to sit with are all of the ways in which feeling s like regret or sadness or loss are, in fact, deeply painful, even as they can lead to something else.  

Chris Bobel: I actually wonder if I could probe a little bit, because I really like the direction this is taking, Ann, and like you, I’m a big fan of sitting in the muck and refusing the rush to moving on or closure or “getting over it” or doing something productive. I appreciate your listening to our question and saying, “Hold on a minute.” So could we hold on a minute? And could you talk a little bit about sitting with regret and what that might look like? When you think about sitting with regret, what does that look like? What comes to mind for you, Ann? 

Ann Cvetkovich: I think it’s totally context specific. You’ve also raised a really interesting structuring question for the special issue about individual versus collective emotions: do we want to pay close attention to those places where negative feelings like regret have a public dimension? Some of the ones that you indexed were reproductive-justice issues, issues around gender transition, and political movements and the ways in which they can go awry. We could hold those as possible points of reference, each one quite different.  

It’s also very important to look at the individual level. In my own work, I’ve often turned to forms of personal narrative, or what we might now call autotheory, and have also looked to other people’s memoirs and stories in order to see what they have to say. There is the human tendency to say, “Ah, I don’t want to sit with the muck. I don’t want to have those bad feelings.” Then culturally, there’s an impatience or desire to get over it and move on. So it’s difficult work to do.  

With respect to regret specifically, I’m thinking that it is about loss, but it’s also perhaps paradigmatically about a sense of having done something wrong, or of something having gone wrong in a particular way, feeling terrible about that, and then trying to figure out what is to be done. I use an activist framing–as in, what do we do if it’s a collective form of wrongdoing? The question of regret also taps into different understandings of justice: how is justice done if we get away from carceral or punitive forms? We now have so much more vocabulary available to us when we talk about restorative justice, transformative justice, healing justice. There are some tools beginning to emerge for addressing ways in which one could have done something wrong, and there would be some way to really feel that keenly and then ask how—and, again, vocabularies are very loaded, but let’s use “amends”–how can amends be made? What is the place of apology? Although I’m suspicious of apology as something that is too easy or too fast. This has been one of the key issues around the dynamics of truth and reconciliation commissions and different kinds of amnesty and so on for wrongdoing. What would it really mean to do restorative justice? I don’t know fully the answer to these questions. This is why the work you’re doing is interesting, because maybe it will produce, if not answers, at least a sense of why it’s so difficult.  

Part of the difficulty lies in the agency around “I may have done something wrong, or I regret this thing,” rather than “something was done to me” or “I am a victim of a structure or an event.” Something about regret really builds in complicated questions of agency: “Where does the wrong or the suffering or the pain come from, and what is my accountability or responsibility to address it?” You used the word “muck,” and I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of being “stuck.” I have also, in dialogue with Lauren Berlant, written about depression as a form of impasse. What happens if we can’t move—we’re literally stuck? Generativity is about where to get some movement, some way of moving.  

I found myself, in response to your questions, thinking temporally about this. What happens if we’re stuck in the past and can’t move forward? I was glad that you invited Heather Love to participate in the roundtable. Heather’s work has been very important to me around questions of queer temporality, feeling backwards, and dwelling in the past. Heather and others—Carolyn Dinshaw, Elizabeth Freeman, a whole host of queer scholars working on temporality—have insisted that sometimes we do want to hold on to the past, whereas the normative model is about “getting over it” and having clean forms of mourning as opposed to melancholy. This work has been enormously generative in queer studies and in other contexts and would be another piece to add into the mix with regret: What kind of looking backward is this? What are the good parts of dwelling in that past and not moving forward? Where might we want to find ways to unstick so as to move more flexibly between the past and the present? You can’t get rid of the thing you did that was wrong. You cannot. You have to accept it in order to really do justice to it. But can you have a life going forward? 

Chris Bobel: Wow, that’s incredibly rich, and you’ve set me up perfectly for the follow-up question that we planned. I’m going to pull on one of the threads, which is feminists taking responsibility for our choices and doing so in a way that isn’t insincere, defensive, somehow disempowered or prematurely apologetic. This thread is important to us, because Laura and I have been talking about what some might describe as “regret culture,” particularly feminist regret culture, where feminists are often being asked to publicly regret, let’s say, sex-positive politics, or carceral feminism, or insufficiently intersectional feminism. I know, for example,  my students are often policing intersectionality in the classroom. So can you talk a little bit more about this feminist practice of looking backward? Do you see that happening? It sounds like you do based on some of the examples you offered us. And also, what do we do in this moment? What is the way to “sit in the muck” and do something reparative, something that is building a feminist future, but not too fast? 

Ann Cvetkovich: You called it “intrafeminist regret” in your notes. I like that term because it suggests some of the connections between regret and infighting within feminism. One possible value of the focus on regret is just that regret gives us some traction to try to solve political tensions that have been very intractable and often remain so. My ears perked up when you said “sex-positive” feminism because that’s one debate that has been very near and dear to my heart. I continue to learn from and encourage my students or younger folks to learn from those extremely divisive moments within feminism, where people could be on the same page and then not on the same page at all. I am an unapologetic pro-sex or sex-positive feminist, and that is a place where feminism sometimes attaches itself to “no regrets,” in the sense that we refuse to back down off the hobby horse of our own positions. I don’t know if you quoted Edith Piaf anywhere in your special issue, but the meme of “Non, je ne regrette rien” (No, I regret nothing) is a stance that we often take up, especially when conflict is heightened. I’m not a “no regrets” person, but I definitely circulate with people who are, and it’s always interesting to me when I do find the places where I have no regrets. I’m generally a mixed-feelings person, so I don’t like it when I or others seem to be only in one camp, and my interest in intrafeminist conflict has to do with the ways we do fight or have 

Issues of intersectionality, racism, white feminisms are another thread in the special issue and another one of those places where we’re still trying to learn what it’s like to apologize but also do more than apologize. For white feminists, there is an affective politics around what have been called microaggressions, or forms of ordinary racism, and all the new languages of being called out, being called in, being canceled, and the ways in which people feel shame and then handle what they did wrong very badly. Again, I don’t have answers. I think it’s a very intricate process of being willing to process often really small, everyday moments of exchange between people that then serve as a map to what needs to happen at larger or more collective levels within groups. We are in an interesting moment with respect to different generations of feminism and trying to track better ways of being in the same room together, across racial identities, across gender identities.  

It feels so old, too. We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’re not going to figure it out or be able to do the work unless we’re willing to do certain kinds of emotional work, right? Just saying, in the abstract, “this is the right way forward” is not going to work. In the book I’m finishing now, I borrow from Eli Clare the notion of “grappling.” Clare uses it in the context of grappling with cure and his ambivalence about the nature of cure within the context of disability justice. And I borrow it for any number of concepts about which I have mixed feelings, care being one of them; regret could easily be another.  

Another place where I can often be, in spite of myself, very strident is in relation to medicalized understandings of mental health and affect terms. I will insist, “No, I need to think about it culturally or aesthetically. I don’t want to think about it in scientific terms or medical terms.” And yet there are people I may know and love dearly who think about it in a different way, and that’s certainly true for sex positivity. Grappling is also probably our best way forward in the extremely, in my world, divisive and painful frictions around trans feminism and what’s called “terfiness.” That’s not easy. 

Chris Bobel: I just wanted to validate—I mean, your words are like filling my lungs with air. I just so appreciate your reminder that there’s beauty and there’s pain in the struggle — that we have to struggle against these quick fixes or premature closures… because we don’t spend the time to really tap into the emotional. So we know that the personal is political, but it’s also emotional, right? And what I hear you saying is we have to commit to sitting with the discomfort, grappling, struggling, wrestling with the hard stuff, and that any rush to movement or change or apology or repair will not necessarily endure because it’s not rooted in a real, honest reckoning. And am I getting that, Ann?  

Ann Cvetkovich: Yes. And what’s great about doing this in the conversation is that when I hear you read me back to myself that way, I’m nodding vigorously. I think that’s right. And then, a part of me pauses and says, “Yes, easy to say. But what does that actually look like in practice?” We’ve had these principles with us for a long time, at least in the circles I move in, and yet we are still learning, and I’m humbled by what it means to do that in practice. The new book, which has just gone into press with Duke, is called The High Priestess—a very presumptuous and  bold title–and the subtitle is Learning from Somatic Practice. It’s about my turn to practicing and working with the body as a way to continue to learn more about what it would be like to sit with—which  has resonances with Buddhist meditation—to sit with the trouble (or Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble”) but in such a way that there is some movement there. Doing it with other people helps, as well as  literally moving the body or the nervous system. Again, I don’t have a quick-fix answer. With each new challenge that comes up, there’s the practice of trying to sit with it, trying to find ways to move with it.  

Laura Green: I’d like to actually turn us a little bit away from where we have been, which is talking about internal regret—that is to say, regret as produced in persons or by persons, reflecting on their own behavior or on things that have happened the context of their behavior—and turn toward what emerged as the focus of a lot of the articles that were submitted to the journal, which is regret not as experienced but as imposed. This is the kind of weaponization that you were referring to also, Ann: The development of the concept of abortion regret, which polices women’s reproductive choices. Or the threat of regret around gender transition. This is regret in the form of a threat.  

One of the things that I always find striking about these threats as well is the future anterior tense. They have a very weird relationship to temporality, which is not even telling people, “You do regret this thing.” But, “If you do this thing, you will turn out to regret it,” which just seems to me like such a bizarre but very effective form of threat. We would love to get your thoughts on these kinds of very explicitly negative and threatening deployments of regret. 

Ann Cvetkovich: Thank you for asking, because we’d be remiss if we focused only on pointing the finger at ourselves and trying to struggle with internal regret, given this very powerful use of regret against people. It’s startling, really. It’s a form of  affective weaponry, including, as you say, the temporality of facing forward—you don’t even get to have the integrity of your own thinking right now, because somehow it’s going to come back to bite you.  

First of all, we just need to expose that threat in order, perhaps, to give people more flexibility to be able to say “no” to it. I think of my younger students, for example, when I move into my more unapologetic “no regrets” about abortion. I had two in my twenties, but that was in the ’80s and ’90s when abortion was readily available and birth control was readily available. There wasn’t the social script that made people feel, “Oh, this is going to be a terrible thing, and I have to somehow make my mixed-feelings choice in the context of ‘I’m doing a bad thing.’” I just don’t think it has to be that way. I feel for my students or for younger people who are coming into a very different context, and it’s a reminder of how much context matters. I was catching traces in some of your notes about the way in which this is very fundamental to reproductive justice in general. Regret would be an interesting thing for that field to take a look at, especially the fraught nature of motherhood that does not allow for  the complexity of ambivalence, feeling, struggle. This is where some of the stuff about being a good enough mother, rather than a perfect mother, is probably good. 

Chris Bobel: Talk about a space where there’s not tolerance for mixed feelings.  

Ann Cvetkovich: The more we make space for that, the better off all those kids with not-great mothers will be. And of course, regret is very relevant to all of the legislation that is shutting down gender-affirming care for people under eighteen. Issues about children or young people not being able to make choices for themselves (because they will regret them) are very significant here.  

Women are also not seen as full subjects able to make their own decisions. But if we were able to accept that “I don’t know what’s going to happen; I’m making the best decision I can right now, and I don’t have to be held to the standard that unless it works out perfectly, those other people were right.” It might be messy. I might change my mind. I might not like what happens. But in a life where things don’t have to be binary or all good, then maybe you allow yourself to move into the consequences of your decision or your choice and work from that place of discomfort but ideally not in a way that condemns you to some sense of absolute failure or wrongness retroactively.  

My abiding interest in affect, generally, and these different strands of keywords and topics like regret, circles back to certain principles around allowing for complexity, allowing for doubt, allowing for not knowing, and then seeing what happens, both for ourselves personally and for the world culturally. This would be another aspect of externally imposed regret: Can we invent other kinds of narratives about where the uncertainty of the future is taking us that don’t track back to a punitive form of regret? I’m imagining (and I’ll risk being misogynist or anti-mom here) that internalized voice of your mother saying, “You’re gonna regret this, dear.” And that gets writ large, culturally, in the hands of other people. There’s something very powerful about that nexus of intimate family dynamics and cultural dynamics, and the way that they relay back and forth together. The affect studies that I like tries to track paths that we haven’t necessarily had much experience with. We’re making it up as we go along. 

Laura Green: You’re also making me want to throw in another vocabulary word here, which is “wrong.” One of the reasons, I think, that regret gets cast as a negative or a dark emotion is that—and I think this is a cultural thing—there’s an idea out there that in a perfect world, you would never be wrong. That a life would not involve ever making wrong choices or having anything to regret. And that, when you think about it, is actually kind of insane. But I do think it’s something that some of us tend to carry around with us. And Anne Cheng actually talked a little bit about this in our roundtable, about the pressure of certain kinds of perfection and holding yourself to a standard where nothing would ever be regrettable. So I don’t know, Ann, if that is something that resonates with what you were saying?  

Ann Cvetkovich: Definitely. I think there are different cultural flavors to not being wrong. One of them would be certain styles of white feminism, of good-girlness, that make being wrong a fate worse than death. And Anne Cheng was no doubt thinking about model minority issues with regard to Asian American culture. I love that cluster of work. David Eng and Shinhee Han’s work on racial melancholia–whose point of departure is the children of immigrants who are carrying the unmourned loss of countries of origin and how melancholy is a way of holding on to a culture that you’re being told to leave behind–provides a very powerful jumping-off point for thinking about other forms of depathologized melancholy. It would be interesting to depathologize regret in order to think about wrongdoing.  

At the same time, with regard to patriarchy, or processes of redress for colonialism or enslavement—we do need a language for admitting that we are wrong. Although that too is contested now. In Texas, there are some schools that are mandating no teaching that would make anyone feel bad about a group they are a part of.  

Chris Bobel: So you talked about tracking paths and this leads us to archival work, which has really been a central contribution you’ve brought us. Heather Love calls that kind of work “backwards forms of activism” (159). I’m thinking about your Public Feelings project, the Feel Tank, the annual depression march. These have always been, in our view, about pointing directly to the sociocultural context that makes us feel the hard stuff, that puts the political back in the personal.  

Now we wanted to mark a contemporary trend, which is, of course, these social-media-based viral confessions and hyper-self-documentation. People are documenting their healing journeys, their self-care strategies, their call outs, their call ins. And we’re wondering if you could think about the power of the counterarchive in the context of this excessive self-documentation. Does it undermine it? Does it give it new power? Does it transform it a bit? What are your thoughts about this trend of documenting everything, letting it all hang out for the countless to see? 

Ann Cvetkovich: That is a big question. It’s interesting to bring it into the orbit of this discussion. I’m glad that you did because it makes me see, “Oh, of course, this is why affect questions and archive questions are never separate for me.” There’s a whole set of issues around counterarchiving and self-documentation as another really important issue for feminism to take up. What is the legacy of personal narrative or the confessional within feminism? What are its white-feminist lineages? What are its lineages in other contexts? I think about the way that Audre Lorde gets taken up by other women-of-color feminists in terms of naming themselves and their stories.  

It’s really important not to overgeneralize. Again, as with what we’ve been saying about regret, we’re faced with the need to track through both critique and reparative approaches. We haven’t yet mentioned it, but in the notes you talked about ways in which feminist discussions of sentimentality might also be relevant to this discussion. This is where I would bring that in, the way in which Lauren Berlant, me, and a host of people of my generation –’80s feminists, not ’70s feminists, very influenced by pro-sex feminism as well–took up women’s popular genres. Lauren was working with romance and fantasy and sentimentality; I was working on sensationalism; other people were working on melodrama. That body of work was so important for understanding the complexity of women’s popular genres, and the way in which, on the one hand, yes, it‘s important to have a critique of sentimentality, of what it does and doesn’t do, through charged representations of motherhood, of women separated from their children, and so on. But we also don’t want to let sentimentality (or confession or self-documentation) be completely skewered. Let us have the critique, but the misogynists don’t get to critique the girly stuff.  

We’re still trying to figure out what the possibilities are for these affective modes and genres. And of course, they keep inventing and reinventing themselves through social media. I want to leave it to my students to figure out, because they swim in these different social media spheres. There are dissertation projects and SubStack posts to be written about these popular phenomena in order to allow more space to be able to both critique and celebrate what it means for people to name themselves.  

For me, critique is easy, but what’s harder is when critique is said and done, what remains? We’re still trying to figure out strategies for telling our stories or telling more complex stories. Regret stories would be an interesting genre to try to rework using different conceptual tools.  

In the book I just wrote about strategies of self-care, I found myself looking to feminists of color, people like Alexis Pauline Gumbs or adrienne maree brown and others who were doing really interesting work via social media to be able to connect with each other, to enable stories to be told. There are all kinds of new and interesting forms of writing workshops and somatic therapy workshops connected to social justice.

Chris Bobel: Those are excellent examples of folks that are doing really deep-tissue work around self-care. They’re dialed into contexts that enable certain kinds of care practices and not universalizing, like, “Hey, everybody has access to take a day off or take a bubble bath or go to the spa.” And to really think about innovative ways of caring for the self that meet the moment. 

Ann Cvetkovich: And are understood as tools for doing the work of social justice, of imagining what a future is, of surviving the daily onslaught of racism. I wonder if regret can be another part of that toolbox. Developing better practices of acknowledging regret and moving through it or with it would be important, not only within our own lives, but also as part of our movements, to be able to admit where we have made mistakes and find ways to move forward. 

Laura Green: I think that’s a theme that has run really throughout this discussion and a wonderful place to end. And I just want to thank you, Ann, for being so willing to just think aloud with us about this topic, its relationship to feminist practices and histories and generations, and it’s just been a privilege to hear your thoughts. So I hope it has sparked also some good thinking for you, and that you will look forward to seeing the words when they are in print as well. 

Chris Bobel: Yes, to learn more from the high priestess! I look very much forward to that. 

Ann Cvetkovich: I want to thank you for inviting me to the conversation. Thank you for that. 

Chris Bobel: Thank you so very much, Ann.