Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as Diagrammatic Practice: Following Conservative Media’s Affective Uptake of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team in Contemporary Culture Wars

Abstract

This article develops Affective Narrative Inquiry (ANI) as a diagrammatic practice for tracing affect as it circulates across media, audiences, and political imaginaries. Focussing on conservative coverage of the United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) from 1999 to 2024, it follows how admiration is progressively reorganised into irritation, hostility, and moral condemnation within contemporary culture wars. Drawing on Ahmed’s affective economies and Bakhtinian dramaturgy, the analysis approaches news articles and comment threads as co-performed narrative assemblages. Across four dramaturgical acts and interludes, ANI maps how pride, resentment, and outrage attach to figures, gestures, and symbols, becoming portable judgements that begin to precede events themselves. The USWNT emerges as an affective surface through which anxieties about gender, nationalism, feminism, and authority are worked. ANI is offered as a methodological contribution for studying affective circulation without treating affect as a stable meaning to decode.