In this session of the colloquium, we will address the relation between affect and gender with regard to guilty pleasures, aesthetics and the body. Linda Williams‘ influential Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess (1991) and Theresa Pratt’s Affect in Sociolinguistic Style (2023) offer two approaches whose parallel reading provokes interesting interdisciplinary frictions. Whereas Williams focusses on excess as spectacle, ecstasy and femininity, Pratt analyzes the cultural currency and linguistic practice of chill masculinity as a strategy of avoiding excess. Both texts explore the intersection of style/aesthetics, gender and affect/-ion with regard to excess. We are interested in the ambivalences of affect and pleasure in these texts, and would like to discuss their entanglement with taste, guilt and social status.