62 pages • 2 hours read
Sara AhmedThe Cultural Politics of Emotion
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “Shame Before Others”
To introduce her discussion of shame, Ahmed returns to the text of Bringing Them Home and its comments regarding the national shame Australians should feel regarding the historical injustice of the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. Through collective recognition of their pain, this kind of shame solidifies collective identity and offers a proposed route toward reconciliation with those who have suffered at the nation’s hand. Ahmed is particularly interested in the way this text divorces group shame from individual guilt, how shame is used to direct attention to some aspects of a wrong while disguising others, and how shame is related to other emotions.
Shame is similar to pain in that it involves a turning away from the other, but it differs in that the attribution of the feeling is self-directed: Instead of blaming the “badness” of the other for causing pain, one directs the responsibility for shame inward and attributes the “badness” to the self. Shame is similar to disgust because both involve the perception of being filled with something bad—but disgust expels this badness, sticking it to the other instead of the self. Shame differs from guilt in that, while both recognize wrongdoing, only shame fills the self and “becomes what the self is about” (Location 2422 of 6419).
Shame is an ambivalent emotion because it creates a sense of apartness from those one desires to draw closer to. It functions this way by intensifying the self’s recognition of both itself and how it appears to the other, negating the self’s worth because it appears to have failed before the ideal other. In feeling shame, one views oneself from the perspective of an other with which one identifies; shame can be felt when one is alone, but only when imagining the reaction of others. This sense of exposure creates a desire to hide the self from the other’s gaze, and the feeling is intensified if the other recognizes one’s shame. The exposure of shame can even cause the skin to “burn” in the form of a blush.
The mediating action of the idealization of others is what makes shame possible. Psychoanalytic theory labels “‘the self’ that a self would like to be” as the “ego ideal” (Location 2449 of 6419), and Ahmed suggests that shame is the conflict between the ego and the ego ideal. The ego ideal is projected onto another and creates coherence through the action of love, in which the self desires to be like and be recognized by this approximated other. It is this coherence, the sense of a communal “we” between the self and the loved other, that is threatened by shame, as the self recognizes its own failure to live up to an ideal. The recognition of shame reaffirms the self’s love for the approximated other and commitment to the perceived shared ideals. Avoidance of future shame motivates continued adherence to shared norms and values.
Ahmed applies these ideas to her reading of Bringing Them Home, suggesting that, for the document’s intended audience of white Australians, taking on as a personal shame the shame of the nation to live up to an ideal identifies the individual with the nation and reaffirms the individual’s love for the country. Through collectively witnessing and acknowledging the pain of Indigenous Australians, the nation—equated with its white citizens—becomes reconciled to itself as a well-meaning nation whose errors are in the past, because experiencing the feeling of shame confirms the nation’s commitment to the ideal it has failed to live up to. This re-instills a feeling of pride because pride is experienced through the perception of living up to an ideal, confirming value and character. Paradoxically, shame operates to confirm the existence of the ideal, allow for the recovery of pride, and align the self with the idealized other—in this case, the nation—even in the presence of actions that contradict the ideal, because the experience of feeling shame after engaging in a contradictory action confirms for the self that it is still aligned with the ideal. Ahmed supports her arguments regarding the functioning of national shame with a detailed examination of the phenomenon of “Sorry Books” in which Australians write messages regarding the nation’s shame over its treatment of Aboriginal peoples.
The chapter closes with a consideration of how official apologies have become key components of compensation for past injuries. Because official apologies are meant to function as evidence of the public’s feelings, Ahmed is interested in how apologies function, specifically what their relationship really is to the emotions they are meant to provide evidence for and to the sense of responsibility they express. In order to work, an apology requires acknowledgement of a specific harm and an expression of sorrow that takes responsibility for causing the harm. It is ultimately a performance, however, that can be successfully accomplished with or without genuine understanding, feeling, or acceptance of responsibility. Its success is dependent on the reaction of an audience, not on the intentions or emotions of the speaker. Its success is also contingent on future actions, because even an apology judged to be effective in the present can be undone by contradictory future actions. This, Ahmed suggests, is one reason that officials are often reluctant to apologize, because they may not be able or willing to meet the demands for future actions that will be seen to “back up” the apology.
Chapter 6 Summary: “In the Name of Love”
An analysis of language excerpted from the white supremacist “Love Watch” site serves as the introduction to Chapter 6’s discussion of love. The Love Watch site is a response to Hatewatch, which is an organization dedicated to identifying hate groups. The text Ahmed has chosen attempts to claim that groups like Hatewatch are the real source of hate and that white supremacists are actually acting out of love. Ahmed recalls that this is a tactic she first identified in Chapter 2. Love Watch identifies the so-called “love groups” that it lists with the nation itself and with a carefully selected set of national values, such as liberty. The critics of racism are recast as the origins of hate, and white supremacist groups are recast as the defenders and lovers of the nation. This conversion of their own hate into love allows right-wing fascist groups to associate themselves with the good feelings reserved for those who defend loved ones and to deny hate as intrinsic to their own agenda: Their hate is not arbitrary, discriminatory, and undeserved––it is a natural reaction to those who attack their beloved nation.
Ahmed offers a second text, a post by the Women’s Information Coordinator of the World Church of the Creator, to demonstrate the role that women play in this conversion of hate into love. She notes that “[l]ove becomes a sign of respectable femininity, and of maternal qualities […]. The reproduction of femininity is tied up with the reproduction of the national ideal through the work of love” (Location 2873 of 6419). That is, the perpetuation of the loved nation as constructed by white supremacists depends on women choosing white male partners and reproducing with them.
Freud conceives of love as a form of dependence threatening the self’s boundaries as the self comes to see another as part of or necessary to the self. Love can be an ambivalent emotion in which the self also hates the loved object for its power over the self. Freud also differentiates between narcissistic love—the love of the self in which love is about being—and anaclitic love—love of an object outside the self, in which love is about possessing. Freud believes that the self’s first development of love takes the narcissistic form of identification, generally with a same-sex parent. The child views this parent as an ideal self and is drawn to them, wishing to be like them to such an extent that the child actually wishes to replace them at some future point. This process of identifying the self with an ego ideal expands the self’s space in the world. It is an active process oriented toward the future, because in identifying with this ideal self, the self is aware that it is not yet perfectly like the ideal self and engages in a process of becoming.
Anaclitic love develops afterward, as the child is able to love the opposite-sex parent—who is more clearly not the self—as a natural extension of identification with the same-sex parent. The opposite-sex beloved is not an ego ideal but rather an ideal object. In both cases, the love that is felt is a projection of qualities of the ego’s ideals and is not intrinsic to the other. Ahmed adds to Freud’s ideas about love the idea that anaclitic love can also be a form of seeking likeness and involves a desire to fuse with the beloved object, despite being disguised as a “natural” attraction to difference. She notes:
The normative conflation of hetero-sex with reproduction means that the bond gets structured around the desire to ‘reproduce well’ [...] ‘making likeness’ by seeing my features reflected back by others, whose connection to me is then confirmed (Locations 2958-2972 of 6419).
This idea of likeness becomes ideological, as well, and the self comes to see family members as alike due to beliefs and character as well as due to genetics. Even when the child is old enough to seek love objects outside the family, the child’s choice is structured by likeness, because ideal objects are limited to those that the imagined ego ideal would approve of.
Freud theorizes that love helps to form group identities by bonding group members around their shared love for a common ego ideal: the group’s leader. That the leader is unlikely to reciprocate this love with equal intensity threatens to negate the self and drives the self to love with greater intensity in its desperation to draw closer to the loved object. Ahmed suggests that the loved object can also be an abstraction, like a nation. Thus, a nation that fails its citizens can be loved and may even be loved more than a nation that seems to reciprocate its citizens’ love. Ahmed sees national love as a form of waiting for the reciprocation of love and believes that this is why future generations become so important. Following Freud, she suggests that the white, Aryan child shaped by the ideals of the nation is the imagined return on the present generation’s investment. This perpetually postponed return requires defensive narratives explaining away the failure of the nation to adequately reciprocate love; Ahmed recalls the language in the Love Watch quote that positions groups like Hatewatch as obstacles to the nation’s proper functioning, blaming them for its failure to return the investment of love. As an example, she discusses the French national reaction to Hijabis. She suggests that love for the nation is represented in the way bodies appear to move toward the national ideal and that concrete differences such as the headscarf appear as movements away, positioning Hijabis as scapegoats and objects of hatred.
To illustrate how multiculturalism is a way of extending love to those perceived as different and how those who fail to live up to the multicultural ideal can also function as the objects of narratives about obstructionism, Ahmed turns her attention to migration, asylum seekers, and race riots in the UK. Those who see themselves as open and tolerant construe the nation as an ideal that embraces multiculturalism and understand the intolerance of racists as the obstacle that prevents the nation from returning the self’s investment. Migrants themselves can also become obstacles in this narrative because some fail to accept the conditions that the nation places on its embrace of them. In the case of Britain, one of these conditions is assimilation, which is seen as vital to the cohesion of the group. Love and demonstrations of mutual love replace shared history and heritage as the source of “likeness” that binds the nation together. For those who prize multiculturalism, it is the faces of ethnically ambiguous women, rather than white Aryan women, who come to represent the nation as the loved object. Ahmed argues that multiculturalism is also, at its heart, narcissistic, both because, as it constructs its image of the group, it portrays the openness of the self as ideal and because it values openness as a means of incorporating the other into the self.
Chapters 5-6 Analysis
Although both shame and love might initially seem to be highly personal experiences, and Ahmed does spend time exploring the personal dimensions of both emotions, her real objective is to demonstrate how these emotions both act to define collectives and cohere them together. She suggests that love is a desire of the self to move toward an idealized other, seeking a reciprocal experience of being loved, and that love can be transferred onto the collective, even onto abstractions such as the nation. Love is thus another example of both Emotions as Shapers of Identity and Emotions as Social and Relational Practices. The self is threatened when the loved object does not reciprocate love adequately, but instead of drawing away, the self often intensifies its pursuit of the loved object. In the case of the love of the nation, this doubling-down process can involve scapegoating others as alleged obstructions preventing the nation from returning one’s love investment, which supports Ahmed’s claims about The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.
Shame is only made possible by love because it occurs when the self feels cut off from the bond of idealization due to its failure to live up to the imagined collective ideal. It is another clear example of Emotions as Social and Relational Practices. Ahmed’s remarks about the resulting feeling that the entire self is bad show that shame also functions as a Shaper of Identity. In the case of national shame, the recognition of collective failure allows the group to reaffirm its identity through the confirmation of shared ideals and to re-establish its pride through the mere fact of feeling shame about its failures. The language of the official apologies that have become a de facto part of national shame is evidence of The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power.
Ahmed’s analysis of love draws heavily from the work of Freud. At times, this means introducing heteronormative ideas that entrench traditional Western conceptions of masculinity and femininity, despite Ahmed’s commitment to deconstructing these norms. After a detailed explanation of Freud’s theories regarding how male children develop narcissistic love for the father and anaclitic love for the mother based on perceptions of likeness and difference, for instance, Ahmed adds theories of her own regarding the falseness of these perceptions in an effort to avoid reifying Freud’s heteronormativity. Throughout the chapter, she attempts to show how Freud’s delineation between narcissistic love and anaclinic love is a distinction without a difference, as when she shows that even multicultural love is essentially narcissistic.
Without naming it as such, Ahmed explores how the sunk cost fallacy influences the self’s love of country and the formation of hatreds against others perceived as interfering with the nation’s capacity to reciprocate love. Having invested substantial energy in the love of country over time, the self resists admitting that this love will never be returned and, instead of walking away from the relationship, doubles down on its investment, believing that this will somehow create a return and make the earlier investment “worth it.” As a part of this doubling down, the self-engages in fantasies about others as sources of obstruction; these fantasy narratives themselves function as investments, which the self must again either continue to embrace despite their lack of efficacy or choose to walk away from. The idea of the sunk cost fallacy predicts that the self will continue to believe, resisting the loss of earlier investment.
