New Formations, Issue 109
Loneliness and Other Symptoms

This issue of New Formations brings together a collection of essays on the topic of loneliness, curated by Jess Cotton, along with three articles on other themes. Loneliness has become a catchall term that is often a stand-in for feelings of depression, isolation and a sense of being politically or socially unconnected. However, the difficulty with history of emotions research is that it risks conflating vastly different experiences. As participants in a roundtable in this issue discuss, language and diagnosis are part of the problem: if not everyone's loneliness is equal, then focusing on the structural forces in which loneliness arises offers a useful way into a historical and political analysis. In an article on the women's movement and Spare Rib magazine, Eleanor Careless and Jess Cotton chart how women in the feminist movement in the 1970s transformed their experiences of isolation through grassroots organising and feminist print publications. Anna Maguire charts the loneliness of the refugee as a psychosocial state of exclusion that is systematically produced by Britain's hostile environment. The complex relationship between televisual and cinematic screens and experiences of loneliness is given extensive consideration in articles by Carlo Cenciarelli and Zlatina Nikolova. All of these articles show the importance of thinking loneliness through the infrastructures and technologies that produce states of inclusion and exclusion. Elsewhere in the issue, Jana Cattien expertly unpicks the threads that make up 'antigender'discourse in modern Germany, interwoven as they are with the fabric of contemporary racism. Jan Overwijk and Dani?l de Zeeuw offer a singularly ambitious, highly persuasive, account of the epistemological politics of contemporary conspiracy theories. In a fascinating complement to their contribution, Stephen Harper and Tom Sykes examine liberal conspiracy theories - such as the moral panic around anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party - as typical of the current political landscape, yet rarely examined alongside conspiracy theories of the right or left. The collected articles in this issue provide an incredibly rich and wide-ranging set of diagnoses of some key symptoms of our contemporary cultural and political condition, which New Formations is proud to make widely available. (From the publisher)