The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Sara Ahmed’s 2004 nonfiction text The Cultural Politics of Emotion is a seminal text in the field of critical affect theory. It asserts that emotion is socially constructed and examines the relationship between emotion and cultural beliefs. Ahmed’s ideas are strongly influenced by Marxism and by psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, and she has devoted her writing and teaching career to these subjects. Ahmed has published 10 other books in the fields of feminist theory, queer theory, and critical studies and has authored dozens of journal articles in these areas.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed is particularly interested in how emotions contribute to identity and to preconceptions about women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Although Ahmed’s approach is philosophical rather than scientific, recent developments in the neuroscientific understanding of emotion tend to support her ideas.

This study guide refers to the Kindle e-book edition of the text’s second edition, published by Routledge in 2015. Citations are given in the form of location numbers throughout and do not reflect on any paginated version of the text.

The original text makes use of several British spellings that differ from standard American spellings; in quotations and the labeling of terms, the original British spellings have been preserved, but elsewhere the American spellings are used.

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.

Summary

In her Introduction, Ahmed prefigures each of the book’s major themes and lays out the book’s structure and purpose. Ahmed’s purpose is to explore the functioning of emotion, which she treats as inseparable from affect or sensation. Specifically, she argues that despite the way emotions are often conceived of and talked about, they are not actually “things” that people can possess. She portrays Emotions as Social and Relational Practices that occur in between people and the objects of their emotions. Because emotions are shaped by social norms, they tend to take repeated forms and to act on people in repeated ways. Through a process called intensificaton, emotions leave impressions on and shape the surfaces of bodies. For this reason, Ahmed sees Emotions as Shapers of Identity. Due to The Stickiness of Emotion, it is common for emotional objects to become so closely associated over time that emotions aimed at one are automatically transferred to the others. People are impacted and reshaped by emotions in different ways, depending on their relationship to power structures. There is a strong Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power and an The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

Each of the book’s eight chapters begins with an introductory quote, drawn from a diverse set of sources. Some are from right-wing, fascist organizations like The Aryan Nations, while others represent the voices of popular charities like Christian Aid. Some excerpts are autobiographical incidents shared by famous philosophers, such as Audre Lorde and Frantz Fanon. In Chapters 1-6, each quote is followed by an introduction to a specific emotion: In order, these are pain, hate, fear, disgust, shame, and love. Chapters 7 and 8 use their quotes to introduce ideas about the emotions of two specific groups: those who identify as queer and those who consider themselves feminists. After introducing each chapter’s subject through analysis of the related quote, Ahmed follows with detailed support for the key propositions in her argument. In these sections of detailed support, Ahmed refers not only to her own ideas but also to a long history of philosophical inquiry into emotion. In her chapters on shame and love, for instance, she incorporates the ideas of Sigmund Freud regarding the ideal other and identification; throughout the text, she relies on the ideas of Judith Butler, on Marx’s ideas of reification and fetishisation, and on Neitzsche’s concept of ressentiment.

In her chapters focused on specific emotions, Ahmed explores both the characteristics of each emotion and its functioning in the world. The focus of Chapter 1 is pain, and Ahmed shows that pain creates a sense of the body being invaded, drawing attention to the boundaries of the self. Ahmed argues that a responsible reaction to others’ pain is to recognize and respond to their distress without making their pain a commodity or co-opting it for the collective’s purposes. Hate, the subject of Chapter 2, circulates in an affective economy, sticking together various objects that are perceived as threats to the self’s or the collective’s continued existence. Chapter 3 focuses on fear, which Ahmed describes as shrinking the body away from perceived threats and functioning as an important force cohering groups together and maintaining their power structures. Disgust is next, in Chapter 4; Ahmed argues that disgust is inherently performative, that it makes a show of rejecting contaminated objects in order to reaffirm the individual’s place in the collective. In her discussion of shame in Chapter 5, Ahmed posits that shame is the experience of failure before the loved other and creates a longing to recover and be seen as worthy of the other’s ideals again—whether that “other” is another person or a collective such as a nation. The final emotion Ahmed explores, in Chapter 6, is love. She portrays love as a force drawing the self toward an ideal other. Again, this ideal other might be an individual person or a collective as large as the nation itself.

Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the emotions of LGBTQ+ people and feminists. In these chapters, Ahmed explores how various emotions manifest differently in the experiences of these groups, and she argues against theorists who urge LGBTQ+ people and feminists to reject all norms because they prop up the misogyny and heteronormativity that injure women and LGBTQ+ people. Instead, Ahmed claims, feminists and LGBTQ+ people should remain engaged with normative spaces and use a politics of discomfort to reshape these spaces in more positive ways.

The book ends with both a Conclusion and an Afterword. In the book’s Conclusion, Ahmed reviews her key arguments and then considers the relationship between emotions and justice, concluding that creating good feelings is not the same thing as creating justice and that causing bad feelings is not the same thing as causing injustice. In her Afterword, which was written as an addition to the book’s second edition, Ahmed offers updates on how the ideas in her text relate to current developments in the understanding of emotion and reflects on her own intellectual history and how it gave rise to the ideas in The Cultural Politics of Emotion.