Cultural Politics of Emotion by Sara Ahmed

By Sara Ahmed

It is a daring tackle the the most important position of emotion in politics. feelings paintings to outline who we're in addition to form what we do and this is often not more powerfully at play than on this planet of politics. Ahmed considers how feelings retain us invested in relationships of energy, and likewise indicates how this use of emotion might be the most important to feminist and queer political hobbies. Debates on overseas terrorism, asylum and migration, in addition to reconciliation and reparation are explored via topical case reports. during this textbook the tricky concerns are faced head on. New for this version: a considerable 15,000-word Afterword on ’Emotions and Their gadgets’ which gives an unique contribution to the burgeoning box of have an effect on reviews; a revised Bibliography; and up-to-date all through.

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I should acknowledge that the meaning of each of the crucial terms – sensation, emotion, affect, cognition and perception – is disputed both between disciplines and within disciplines. Solomon argues that emotions are caused (as reactions), but that objects of emotion must be distinguished from the cause (Solomon 2003: 228). I am making a different claim, which is made possible by my distinction of ‘contact’ from the attribution of causality: the object with which I have contact is the object that I have a feeling ‘about’.

Emotions, for the British National Front, may pose a danger to the national body of appearing soft. But the narrative itself is an emotional one: the reading of others as bogus is a reaction to the presence of others. Hardness is not the absence of emotion, but a different emotional orientation towards others. The hard white body is shaped by its reactions: the rage against others surfaces as a body that stands apart or keeps its distance from others. 5 Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as through orientations towards and away from others.

Such norms appear as forms of life only through the concealment of the work of this repetition. Feminist and queer scholars have shown us that emotions ‘matter’ for politics; emotions show us how power shapes the very surface of bodies as well as worlds. So in a way, we do ‘feel our way’. This analysis of how we ‘feel our way’ approaches emotion as a form of cultural politics or world making. My argument about the cultural politics of emotions is developed not only as a critique of the psychologising and privatisation of emotions,20 but also as a critique of a model of social structure that neglects the emotional intensities, which allow such structures to be reified as forms of being.

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