The Cultural Politics of Emotion

The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Language: English

Pages: 276

ISBN: 1138805033

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Praise for the first edition

"Ahmed's work contributes to cultural studies and rhetorical theory by elaborating a process through which we can approach everyday emotional practices as rich and complex sites interwoven in struggles for social change."--Rachel C. Riedner, JAC

What do emotions do? How do emotions move us or get us stuck? In developing a theory of the cultural politics of emotion, Sara Ahmed focuses on the relationship between emotions, language, and bodies. She shows how emotions are named in speech acts, as well as how they involve sensations that can be felt not only emotionally, but physically. A new methodology for reading 'the emotionality of texts' is offered as are analyses of the role of emotions in debates on international terrorism, asylum and migration, and reconciliation and reparation. Attending to the intersections between race, gender, and sexuality, The Cultural Politics of Emotion is in dialogue with key trends in gender studies and cultural studies, the psychology and sociology of emotions, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis. It takes as its point of entry different emotions -- pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love -- and reflects on the role of emotions in feminist and queer politics.

In a special afterword to this tenth anniversary edition, Ahmed explains to readers how this classic book relates to other key works in the emergent field of affect studies and also reflects on the way the book has been part of her own intellectual trajectory.

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the norms and values that make queer feelings queer in the first place.  1. I borrow this phrase, of course, from Adrienne Rich. I am indebted to her work, which demonstrates the structural and institutional nature of heterosexuality.       2. A queer phenomenology might offer an approach to ‘sexual orientation’ by rethinking the place of the object in sexual desire, attending to how bodily directions ‘towards’ some objects and not others affects how

the other. The sticking together of these speeches produces the following claim: the nation, like Tony Martin, has the right to expel asylum seekers (whatever the means), who as burglars are trying to steal something from the nation, otherwise the nation itself will become ‘the shell’. The moral of the story becomes: if we let them in, they will turn the nation ‘into a shell’, and take the land on which ‘we have worked’. Such a defensive narrative is not explicitly articulated, but rather works

still remained at the centre of intellectual history. As a reader of this history, I have been overwhelmed by how much ‘emotions’ have been a ‘sticking point’ for philosophers, cultural theorists, psychologists, sociologists, as well as scholars from a range of other disciplines. This is not surprising: what is relegated to the margins is often, as we know from deconstruction, right at the centre of thought itself. In the face of this history, my task is a modest one: to show how my thinking has

that allows them to be felt to be disgusting as if that was a material or objective quality. When thinking about how bodies become objects of disgust, we can see that disgust is crucial to power relations. Why is disgust so crucial to power? Does disgust work to maintain power relations through how it maintains bodily boundaries? The relation between disgust and power is evident when we consider the spatiality of disgust reactions, and their role in the hierarchising of spaces as well as bodies.

promise of a ‘sinking’ feeling. It is, after all, pain or discomfort that return one’s attention to the surfaces of the body as body (see Chapter 1). To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view. The disappearance of the surface is instructive: in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies. The sinking

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