Inconvenience and Its Sisters: Lauren Berlant's Last Affective Meditation

Abstract: The Inconvenience of Other People describes how inconvenience may appear a minor affective experience, but it is actually a mode of relationality that governs our lives. This essay takes Lauren Berlant's primary analytic mode—the case study—and applies the lessons of Inconvenience to the films R.M.N . and Promising Young Woman to explore how sexual violence constitutes both an object in itself and an entry point into other ways in which affect can disrupt the naturalization of inequality. Both films frame the conditions under which inconvenience become an event and a major force in our lives that helps us grasp what we owe each other and ourselves.