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The Cultural Politics of Emotion CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page Ii the Cultural Politics of Emotion Second Edition CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page i The Cultural Politics of Emotion CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page ii The Cultural Politics of Emotion second edition Sara Ahmed © Sara Ahmed, 2004, 2014 First edition published by Edinburgh University Press in 2004 Second edition 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Ehrhardt by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd, Hong Kong, and new material by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 9113 5 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 9114 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 9115 9 (epub) The right of Sara Ahmed to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Acknowledgements vi Acknowledgements for the Second Edtion vii Introduction: Feel Your Way 1 1 The Contingency of Pain 20 2 The Organisation of Hate 42 3 The Affective Politics of Fear 62 4 The Performativity of Disgust 82 5 Shame Before Others 101 6 In the Name of Love 122 7 Queer Feelings 144 8 Feminist Attachments 168 Conclusion: Just Emotions 191 Afterword: Emotions and Their Objects 204 References 234 Index 249 CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page vi Acknowledgements I wrote this book whilst I was co-director and then director of the Institute for Women’s Studies at Lancaster University between 2000 and 2003. Thanks to all colleagues and students at Lancaster who helped me stay motivated during a challenging time, especially: Jackie Stacey (who shared the direc- torship with me for two years, and did much more than lighten the load); Rosemary Betterton; Claudia Castañeda; Alison Easton; Anne-Marie Fortier; Gerry Harris; Maureen McNeil; Lynne Pearce; Celia Roberts; Mimi Sheller; Vicky Singleton; Elaine Swan and Imogen Tyler. Thanks to Lauren Berlant whose visits to Lancaster generated much debate about ‘feelings in public’, from which I have greatly benefited. Thanks to Janet Hartley and Sandra Irving for continual and good-humoured support. My appreciation to Yuko Ogawo who gave me wonderful assistance in the preparation of the final manuscript and to Sarah Franklin, Nicole Vittelone, and Mimi Sheller who offered really helpful feedback on an earlier draft. Thanks to Jackie Jones for her excellent editorial advice throughout and her patience towards the end of the project. And my appreciation to Martha Elisa Bojórquez for kindly giving permission to use her beautiful art work for the cover. I have been lucky to edit the book whilst on study leave in Australia. Thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Board who funded this leave. I am very grateful to Elspeth Probyn and staff and students in the Depart- ment of Gender Studies, Sydney University, for providing such a stimulat- ing environment in which to work. Thanks to my family, for being nearby in this past year, and for living under the sun. A special thanks to Sarah Franklin and Imogen Tyler for helping me change directions more than once. Earlier versions of chapters have appeared as follows, and I thank pub- lishers for permission to reprint here: (2001) ‘The Organisation of Hate’ in Law and Critique 13 (3): 345–65, with kind permission of Kluwer Acade- mic Publishers; (2002) ‘Contingency of Pain’ in Parallax 8 (1): 17–34 CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page vii acknowledgements vii (http://www.tandf.co.uk/journalsroutledge/13534645.html; (2003) ‘The Politics of Fear in the Making of Worlds’ in International Journal of Quali- tative Studies in Education 16 (3): 377–98 (http://www.tandf.co.uk); (2003) ‘Feminist Futures’ in M. Eagleton (ed.), The Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, Blackwell.Blackwell. PermissionPermission toto quotequote fromfrom Bringing Bringing Them them HomeHome was granted by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Australia. Acknowledgements for the Second Edition With thanks to Jackie Jones for suggesting and supporting a second edition of this book and to the editorial team at Edinburgh University Press for their help and efficiency. My appreciation to those with whom I have conversed about affect and emotion in the past decade including Lauren Berlant, Lisa Blackman, Kristyn Gorton, Sneja Gunew, Jin Haritaworn, Carolyn Pedwell, Elspeth Probyn, Divya Tolia-Kelly and Imogen Tyler. Thanks to my now- not-so-new colleagues at Goldsmiths for creating such a friendly and lively space to work; and to those who helped set up our new Centre for Feminist Research especially Sarah Kember, Angela McRobbie, Beverley Skeggs, and Natalie Fenton. And my heartfelt thanks to Sarah Franklin for travelling with me on this intellectual journey. CPEPR 6/11/07 6:15 PM Page viii CPEIN 6/11/07 6:16 PM Page 1 Introduction: Feel Your Way Every day of every year, swarms of illegal immigrants and bogus asylum seekers invade Britain by any means available to them... Why? They are only seeking the easy comforts and free benefits in Soft Touch Britain. All funded by YOU – The British Taxpayer! (British National Front Poster)1 How does a nation come to be imagined as having a ‘soft touch’? How does this ‘having’ become a form of ‘being’, or a national attribute? In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, I explore how emotions work to shape the ‘sur- faces’ of individual and collective bodies. Bodies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and others. My analysis proceeds by reading texts that circulate in the public domain, which work by aligning subjects with collectives by attributing ‘others’ as the ‘source’ of our feelings. In this quote from the British National Front, ‘the others’, who are named as illegal immi- grants and bogus asylum seekers, threaten to overwhelm and swamp the nation. This is, of course, a familiar narrative, and like all familiar narratives, it deserves close and careful reading. The narrative works through othering; the ‘illegal immigrants’ and ‘bogus asylum seekers’ are those who are ‘not us’, and who in not being us, endanger what is ours. Such others threaten to take away from what ‘you’ have, as the legitimate subject of the nation, as the one who is the true recipient of national benefits. The narrative invites the reader to adopt the ‘you’ through working on emotions: becoming this ‘you’ would mean developing a certain rage against these illegitimate others, who are rep- resented as ‘swarms’ in the nation. Indeed, to feel love for the nation, whereby love is an investment that should be returned (you are ‘the taxpayer’), is also to feel injured by these others, who are ‘taking’ what is yours. It is not the case, however, that anybody within the nation could inhabit this ‘you’. These short sentences depend on longer histories of articulation, CPEIN 6/11/07 6:16 PM Page 2 which secure the white subject as sovereign in the nation, at the same time as they generate effects in the alignment of ‘you’ with the national body. In other words, the ‘you’ implicitly evokes a ‘we’, a group of subjects who can identify themselves with the injured nation in this performance of personal injury. Within the British National Front, the ‘we’ of the nation is only avail- able to white Aryans: ‘We will reinstate the values of separatism to our racial kindred. We will teach the youth that one’s country is the family, the past, the sacred race itself . We live in a nation that is historically Aryan’.2 This alignment of family, history and race is powerful, and works to transform whiteness into a familial tie, into a form of racial kindred that recognises all non-white others as strangers, as ‘bodies out of place’ (Ahmed 2000).3 The narrative is addressed to white Aryans, and equates the vulnerability of the white nation with the vulnerability of the white body. ‘YOU’ will not be soft! Or will you? What is so interesting in this narrative is how ‘soft touch’ becomes a national character. This attribution is not specific to fascist discourses. In broader public debates about asylum in the United Kingdom, one of the most common narratives is that Britain is a ‘soft touch’: others try and ‘get into’ the nation because they can have a life with ‘easy comforts’.4 The British Government has transformed the narrative of ‘the soft touch’ into an imper- ative: it has justified the tightening of asylum policies on the grounds that ‘Britain will not be a soft touch’. Indeed, the metaphor of ‘soft touch’ sug- gests that the nation’s borders and defences are like skin; they are soft, weak, porous and easily shaped or even bruised by the proximity of others. It sug- gests that the nation is made vulnerable to abuse by its very openness to others. The soft nation is too emotional, too easily moved by the demands of others, and too easily seduced into assuming that claims for asylum, as tes- timonies of injury, are narratives of truth. To be a ‘soft touch nation’ is to be taken in by the bogus: to ‘take in’ is to be ‘taken in’. The demand is that the nation should seal itself from others, if it is to act on behalf of its citi- zens, rather than react to the claims of immigrants and other others. The implicit demand is for a nation that is less emotional, less open, less easily moved, one that is ‘hard’, or ‘tough’.
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