Hold it against me : difficulty and emotion in contemporary art / Jennifer Doyle.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introducing difficulty -- Hard feelings -- Patrolling the border between art and politics -- Vocabulary shift: from controversy to difficulty -- Difficulty's audience -- Three case studies in difficulty and the problem of affect -- A blank: Aliza Shvarts, untitled -- Theater of cruelty: Thomas Eakins, the gross clinic -- Touchy subject: Ron Athey, incorruptible flesh: dissociative sparkle -- Thinking feeling: criticism and emotion -- What happened to feeling? -- The difficulty of sentimentality: Franko B's I miss you! -- The strange theatricality of tears: nao Bustamante's Neapolitan -- Relational aesthetics and affective labor -- Feeling overdetermined: identity, emotion, and history -- The difficulty of identity -- James Luna's the history of the Luiseno people (Christmas, La Jolla Reservation). -- Difficulty and ideologies of emotion. -- Carrie Mae Weems's From here I saw what happened and I cried. -- David Wojnarowicz's Untitled (Hujar Dead).