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.
Conclusion-AfterwordChapter Summaries & Analyses
Conclusion Summary: “Just Emotions”
Ahmed’s Conclusion begins with a brief text about a child injured in a Baghdad bombing, followed by a reiteration of the core argument she has been constructing throughout the text: Emotions are a relational practice operating through stickiness and repeated impressions to shape identity. She proposes to use the book’s conclusion to discuss the relationship between emotions and justice, particularly as manifested in texts.
Ahmed asks what happens when texts insist upon grieving the ungrievable and whether these texts in some way convert injustice to justice. The text about Ali, the injured Iraqi child, draws attention to his wounds and implicitly asks its target audience, the British public, to mourn for his injuries. Through synecdoche, the child stands in for the multitude of other Iraqi injured and dead; Ahmed suggests that the focus on Ali in some way substitutes for and thus erases these others as the face of the innocent child is offered to the British public as an object of charity. Feeling Ali’s pain allows the public to reaffirm its identity as the source of love and compassion for those who “deserve” these emotions and to feel itself “above” the absent, undeserving others. The extension of compassion is viewed as a gift of the hope of being brought into “civil” society and implies the object of charity’s indebtedness to the compassionate nation.
This example, says Ahmed, shows that the translation of bad feelings into good feelings is not always a form of justice, but often merely repeats injustice. The relationship between emotions and justice is complex because claims of justice and injustice cannot be solely based on feelings. A violent action cannot be claimed to be just or unjust based on whether its object is perceived to have suffered; one has no access to the feelings of others, and in any case, violence can be disguised in ways that create unconscious but not conscious suffering.
To bolster her claim that emotions must be understood as active and performative rather than as possessions that people can claim to “have” or “not have,” Ahmed reviews her claims in Chapters 1 and 2 about the circulation of emotions through impressions that act on bodily surfaces and her more widely distributed claims about racism as a form of intensification that moves bodies toward and away from one another based on histories of contact. Regardless of whether these bodies perceive their emotions as coming from inside or outside of themselves, the emotions are really a performative system of sticky signs that exist between subject and object, working to shape their boundaries. The language of emotion is a form of power that acts to align subjects with one another and stick objects together. Because emotions are not internal possessions, Ahmed disputes the idea that justness is a personal characteristic associated with experiencing particular feelings. This idea disguises both the social nature of justice and injustice and the power relationships inherent in defining the good. Emotions can, however, through actions, invest in unjust social norms; conversely, emotion can challenge unjust social norms through collective feelings—such as pain and anger—that acknowledge their cost.
Just as injustice is not equivalent to feeling negative emotions such as pain, justice is not identical with good feelings that overcome pain. Public culture often promises happiness as a return for investing in the collective and in social norms. Ahmed invokes her Chapter 6 arguments regarding the lack of return on love investments to explain how, even though this promised happiness always recedes into the future, people are not deterred by the lack of return on their investment in norms. When happiness is mistakenly equated with justice, justice also becomes an illusory promise for the future sustained through its own lack of fulfillment.
Ahmed analyzes whether the restorative justice movement is an appropriate use of emotions in the interests of justice. Although she sees merit in its emphasis on the individual, because too often justice is depersonalized and hides the impact of injustice on individuals, she does worry that this same emphasis on the individual may erase the systemic dimension of crime. Further, the exchange of emotional signs between individuals that makes up a large part of restorative justice actions can be as tainted by inauthenticity and misunderstanding as with any public expression of emotion. She also questions the emphasis restorative justice places on restoring social bonds. Idealization of social bonds troubles her for the same reasons she cites in her Chapter 6 discussion of multiculturalism.
Finally, Ahmed considers how emotions operate within the politics of reparation. The public testimonies called for during the meeting of truth commissions allow for the witnessing of individual stories. Although these stories can be co-opted by the collective, the space offered in public testimony is at least a form of recognition of the individual pain caused by racism, colonization, and other systemic injustices. The public admission of historical injustice contributes to a reshaping of the present as it exposes the ways in which collective narratives have covered over the truth. These testimonies must often be repeated again and again in order to overcome resistance to hearing them; this makes political struggle difficult emotional labor. The effect of this labor should be to allow individuals who have suffered to feel better, not to make the national collective feel better. Those who have suffered should also be free not to testify, to not undertake this labor. The goal of reconciliation and reparation should be to create space for whatever makes victims feel better and feel more at ease in the world. Ahmed closes with an analogy comparing emotional healing to physical healing. The best outcome, she argues, is a wound that closes but is not disguised by being covered over; it remains visible as a sign of the injury. Just emotions work with scars rather than trying to disguise or erase them.
Afterword Summary: “Emotions and Their Objects”
The book’s Afterword was written in 2014 as an addition to the second edition. In it, Ahmed reflects on writing the book for its original 2004 publication. She notes how her position in the feminist collective of the Women’s Studies program at Lancaster University influenced her ideas. Her original intention as she began the book was to reflect on the ways in which social norms become attached to affects, driving the reproduction of worlds. Along the way, the book became centered on emotions themselves, and the process of researching and writing the book reignited Ahmed’s interest in intellectual history. Her purpose in writing this Afterword, she says, is to comment on the book’s relationship to emerging ideas and to show how her own intellectual history relates to the ideas in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
The first development that Ahmed addresses is the so-called “affective turn” in critical theory. Although as she was writing the book she did not explicitly think of it as part of this movement, she sees how this movement influenced her ideas. While some thinkers and critics acknowledge that considerations of affect were well-established within feminist and queer theory before this time, Ahmed notes that others want to separate the affective turn from these movements, as if it is an entirely new phenomenon. Ahmed disputes this reading of history, arguing that affect is foundational to the approaches in feminist theory. She is also disturbed by the increasing insistence on separating affect from emotion and, in the process, privileging affect. She sees this as a gendered distinction that at least in part functions to degenerate feminist and queer thought by casting it as more concerned with emotion than affect.
Ahmed maintains in the Afterword, as she had years earlier in the writing of The Cultural Politics of Emotion, that this distinction is artificial and inhibits meaningful analysis. Collapsing the two ideas allows for the discussion of emotion as both personal and collective and for Ahmed to meet her objective of “develop[ing] a model of emotion that involves subjects but is not reducible to them” (Location 4795 of 6419). It also allows for the phenomenological approach that Ahmed favors, focused on intentions and the direction of emotions toward objects. The Cultural Politics of Emotion reflects the interest Ahmed was developing at the time in emotions as the motivation for particular types of movement toward and away from objects and the resulting shaping of both bodily and social space.
Ahmed turns to a consideration of her own intellectual history, explaining how an idea from her earlier book, Strange Encounters, led to her interest in writing The Cultural Politics of Emotion. She became interested in how some bodies are recognized and labeled as strangers through affective judgments that stick objects together, as in the case of Trayvon Martin. Martin’s case also illustrates how this process affects some bodies more than others because of the history of cultural politics. It was clear to Ahmed that the “suspiciousness” of the stranger does not inherently reside in the object of the stranger but is instead socially constructed; she has also come to believe that the socially constructed scripts that teach people what to fear, like racism, are also responsible for the construction of the feeling of fear itself.
Ahmed states that what inspired the choice to focus on the emotional content of texts throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion was Ahmed’s desire to show how language facilitates emotional stickiness and the differential impact this stickiness has on different types of bodies. Ahmed also wanted to consider how language attributes feeling, both to the self and to the other, in ways that repeat the effects of violence by making unwarranted assumptions. Her interest in these ideas led Ahmed to the empirical research that formed the basis for her 2012 book On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.
Ahmed explains next that her insistence on focusing on the circulation of objects over the circulation of feeling is due to her belief that affects do not pass easily between bodies, and when feelings do seem to circulate, there is no way to know whether the bodies involved are experiencing the same affective response. Instead, she simply wanted to point out that objects can accumulate affective value that is assigned through social scripts without speculating on the exact interior response of the bodies involved. She elaborates on these ideas by analyzing what she calls “happy objects.” Social scripts assign happiness to certain objects, such as weddings, based on the way they “point” toward other objects of happiness, such as marriage. These objects circulate regardless of the way individuals actually feel while experiencing them. People feel disappointment when they are unable to close the gap between their interior experiences and the way they are, according to social scripts, supposed to feel.
Ahmed speculates that, when people do appear to “pass” emotions among themselves, it may be more the case that one person with a strong feeling establishes a mood that others may be more or less attuned to and that, for the people experiencing this contagion of emotion, the original object of emotion may not be shared. Since there is a social benefit to attunement with others, in the form of a collective bond, there is also a social risk from openly displaying a lack of attunement. She brings this discussion back to her earlier commentary about the construction of strangers by noting that someone clearly excluded from attunement may be read as a stranger. Here, Ahmed introduces the idea of the killjoy, a person who openly fails to share a happy mood and who is thereby cast into the role of “affect alien.”
Finally, Ahmed applies the figure of the stranger and her analysis of happiness to political rhetoric. She notes how the political climate toward multiculturalism has changed in the years since the publication of The Cultural Politics of Emotion and the narrowing of the gap between fascist and mainstream uses of the concept of love. She examines the public rhetoric of British Prime Minister David Cameron, noting the ways in which openness is equated with vulnerability in the face of the stranger who does not share the collective’s open and loving attitude. The feelings of vulnerability and anxiety already in circulation are identified as collective feelings, encouraging others to share these feelings and understand them as having a shared object, the stranger: “In naming or describing an atmosphere, whether to ourselves or others, we also give it form” (Location 5206 of 6419). Another kind of stranger, the killjoy, is created when public rhetoric presents a supposed object of happiness to the collective, such as the Royal Wedding or the Royal Jubilee; those who do not give evidence of sharing the mood of happiness that public rhetoric insists upon are alienated from the collective. These examples demonstrate an important aspect of citizenship: It appears to demand sympathy of feeling as a condition of full participation.
Conclusion-Afterword Analysis
The book’s Conclusion shares some structural details with earlier chapters. Similarly to Chapters 1-8, the Conclusion begins with the analysis of a quote, then moves on to develop key ideas in more detail. However, the Conclusion does not introduce a new emotion or a new group’s emotions and then reinforce this discussion with a final quote—instead, it considers the implications Ahmed’s previous arguments have for the larger context of justice.
The Conclusion is somewhat pedagogical in its approach, resembling a hybrid between the review at the end of a lesson and the conclusion of a typical scholarly paper. The Conclusion begins with a repetition of key themes: Emotions as Social and Relational Practices, The Stickiness of Emotion, and Emotions as Shapers of Identity. Ahmed uses the remainder of the Conclusion to reiterate these ideas and explore their relationship to The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality and The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power. As Ahmed analyzes the excerpt about Ali, she explicitly recalls of where in The Cultural Politics of Emotion she initially explained each of her ideas, allowing this analysis, too, to function as a review of the text’s key ideas. This offers an additional opportunity to see how these ideas function in conjunction with one another and to understand their application to a real-world situation. Following this analysis, she pauses again to summarize the text’s key ideas before her more extended and detailed discussion of how emotions relate to justice. It is in this consideration of how her arguments about emotion relate to the broader concept of justice that the Conclusion most resembles the typical scholarly work, as these works often end by placing the ideas they have considered into a wider context.
The Afterword, by contrast, departs markedly from the structures that have characterized the rest of the work. Although its ideas are related to one another, they do not form one complete and carefully structured argument as do each of the sections in the first edition. The Afterword begins with a critique of how the “affective turn” that Ahmed’s text is widely considered to be a part of is being gradually divorced from its feminist origins as a part of the separation of affect from emotion that so bothers Ahmed. It then turns to a discussion of a selection of intellectual antecedents for The Cultural Politics of Emotion, showing how each influenced the choices Ahmed made in the 2004 text. Finally, it introduces arguments related to the stranger and the circulation of happiness; it is only at this point that Ahmed returns to her characteristic strategy of employing exemplar texts.
It is unsurprising that the Afterword differs greatly from the remainder of the book, of course: It was written many years later and has an entirely different function. The intention of Ahmed’s Afterword is not primarily to instruct or to advance brand new scholarly arguments. Its function is to look back from a later time period and contextualize the book itself as an artifact. The Afterword considers The Cultural Politics of Emotion’s relationship to the movement of both others’ ideas and Ahmed’s own.
