Abstract
Ambiguity refers to the instability or multiplicity of meaning and is therefore something of a fact of life, whereas affect is not an issue of meaning as such. The turn to affect in cultural inquiry from the 1990s has partly been a reaction to the perceived dominance of questions connected to meaning, representation, and signification within the humanities and social sciences. This chapter focuses on how affective intensities are registered in different bodies and, consequently, how they impact ways of making sense of the world, opening up spaces for thinking mutually conflicting meanings together without doing away with irreconcilable tensions between them. The issue is one of ambivalence and mixed feelings but, even more centrally, that involving epistemological work on the possibilities and impossibilities of knowing. Ambiguity means that things can be both and. This chapter explores what this means for how we address approach in cultural analysis and in media research in particular.