The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Content Warning: Because The Cultural Politics of Emotion is concerned with the connection between emotion and the experiences of marginalized groups, this study guide frequently refers to bigotry and violence against these groups.

The Introduction begins with a quote from a British National Front poster. The quote attempts to arouse the public’s emotions against immigrants and accuses Britain of being a “Soft Touch” country that is being taken advantage of (Location 67 of 6419). Ahmed explains that her intention in The Cultural Politics of Emotion is to interrogate how language like this is used to shape both personal and national identity. The book will closely examine examples of public language and consider how this language positions some people as subjects within a collective and others as outsiders who cause the collective to experience particular emotions. To illustrate this methodology, Ahmed performs a close reading of the quote from the National Front poster.

The poster is aimed at a specific audience—white, Aryan, British people—who are presented as a collective representing the “true” nation. This audience is encouraged to feel vulnerable to invasion by the immigrant other and to reject the “softness” that allegedly characterizes a nation open to immigration. Through its metaphorical comparison of national borders with human skin, the poster’s language implies equivalence between the softness and vulnerability of individual bodies and the softness and vulnerability of the corporate, national “body.” Ahmed further points out that the idea of soft bodies being penetrated by the other is inherently gendered and creates an equivalence between the soft nation, emotion, and the feminine. The solution proposed to this alleged problem is to be not “soft” but “hard,” to limit emotion in the interest of security.

Ahmed next discusses the cultural hierarchy that places logic above emotions and also ranks emotions according to how animalistic they are perceived to be. The status of various emotions is transferred to the bodies of people. Lower-status emotions and the quality of being emotional in general are ascribed to lower-status people. Ahmed goes further, claiming that emotions “shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time, as well as orientations toward and away from others” (Location 138 of 6419). For this reason, she is primarily interested in what emotions do rather than what they are. The book will consider how emotions circulate among people and how they sometimes “stick” to bodies, shaping their identities.

Philosophers have long been divided between those who think emotions arise directly from affect and those who think of emotions as cognitive interpretations of affect. Ahmed does not believe that emotion and affect are fully separate phenomena. Following Descartes, she argues that emotions arise out of context, because of people’s personal interpretations of whether the objects they encounter are beneficial or harmful to themselves. David Hume’s use of the word “impression” in his discussion of emotion interests Ahmed: She points to various meanings of this word and its relationship to the root word “press” as support for her idea that emotions arise out of contact among surfaces. She notes that she will use the word “impression” in her own discussion of emotion, as it allows her to avoid artificial distinctions between thought, bodily sensation, and emotion. She will add to this contextual view of emotions the idea that emotions are an intentional orientation to the world and help people understand it.

Emotions, Ahmed suggests, are social phenomena. They are neither an “inside-out” experience as psychologists posit nor an “outside-in” experience as anthropologists and sociologists posit, but rather something that exists in-between objects, creating the boundaries and identities of the objects’ surfaces. Emotions create the actual effects of interiority and externality, individual and societal. As emotions repeatedly circulate, they create objects that emotions “stick” to, creating collective impressions that can especially impact those designated as the “other.”

The final section of the Introduction circles back to Ahmed’s intention to structure her book via the close reading and analysis of specific public texts. She notes that her analysis will be particularly concerned with metonymy and metaphor, as she is interested in the ways that figures of speech and emotions become stuck together in ways that can be hidden from conscious understanding. She has selected texts for their focus on particular emotions, to explore how emotions are named and delineated and how their social performances and impacts differ. Ahmed explains what each chapter of the book will focus on and explains how the various ideas covered in each chapter will build toward a cohesive argument. She states that she will end the book by considering how emotions can operate in the reimagination of norms within feminist and queer politics.