“this is not to deny the misogyny of flaubert’s text or the way in which flaubert fetishized his own sense of loss (through an imaginary identification with femininity) while simultaneously sharing his own period’s hostility toward women. nevertheless, if melancholy and boredom are both defined by a certain self-consciousness, in melancholy, self-consciousness is painful precisely because the perception of otherness comes at the cost of exclusivity. in boredom, by contrast, self-consiousness is more “vague” and “superficial”…more apt to bring into representation women’s experiences of everyday life. whereas melancholia is about loss and converting male loss into representational gains, boredom, at least in the twentieth century, is about excess, sensory stimulation, and shock (generated as much by the existence of others as by the media and overproduction). what is ever present in melancholia and seems palpably missing from boredom is thus an overriding sense of nostalgia for an exclusive fantasy of privileged suffering that separates self from others. in boredom, there is no sense of privilege or nobility. indeed, in the twentieth century boredom becomes both a ‘democratic affliction’ and a great leveler, bound up with changing definitions of work and leisure, art and mass culture, aesthetics and sexual difference.
boredom, in other words, is at once an empty and an overflowing conceptual category—empty because it has no ultimate, transcendent meaning; overflowing and excessive because even when it appears fixed it still contains within it definitions that are denied or suppressed.”
—patrice petro in “historical ennui, feminist boredom,” aftershocks of the new: feminism and film history
