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.
Background
Philosophical Context: The Pre-Existing Conversation About 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.
Ahmed’s analysis of the characteristics and functioning of emotion enters a conversation about emotion that dates back at least to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. In Rhetoric, Book 2, Aristotle lays out theories regarding emotion that remain highly influential today; most relevant is his distinction between affect and emotion, a distinction Ahmed regards as artificial and not worth wasting time on. As the Western philosophical conversation around emotion developed over time, some philosophers began to focus on definitional discussions, concerning themselves with labeling, delimiting, and categorizing emotions in various schemes or debating the relationships among the sensory, the cognitive, and the motivational. These approaches are not the focus of Ahmed’s work. Rather, Ahmed is interested in one specific aspect of the philosophical discussion of emotions: What do emotions do in the world?
This phenomenological and behavioral thread of the philosophical discussion has been developed over the years through the contributions of thinkers, such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, David Hume, René Descartes, Anthony Kenny, and many others. Several different opinions have emerged regarding what emotions are and do in the world: Ahmed is influenced by the tradition of continental philosophy, retaining what has value in this tradition while adding ideas informed by feminism, postcolonial theory, and queer theory. Ahmed borrows her conception of emotions as shapers of bodies from Spinoza’s work, the idea of ressentiment from Nietzsche, the idea of impressions from Hume, and the idea of emotions as contextual from Descartes. Ahmed discusses Heidegger’s ideas about the temporality and directionality of emotions in her arguments about fear and anxiety. Kenny, a more recent theorist, was the first to suggest that emotions are directed at formal objects; this idea is fundamental to each of Ahmed’s arguments about specific emotions.
Ideological Context: Marxist, Freudian, Postcolonial, Queer, and Feminist Theory
Ahmed’s work is considered a substantial contribution to the field of critical affect theory. Critical theory critiques society through analysis of its norms, with the objective of challenging power structures and creating transformation. Critical affect theory attempts to incorporate the study of affects and emotions into this process. This field is deeply informed by Marxism and by Freudian, postcolonial, queer, and feminist theory.
Karl Marx was a 19th-century German political economist and philosopher whose theories about history, human nature, and political economy transformed modern thinking on these subjects. He believed that capitalism is an inherently exploitative system propped up by social norms that disguise differing class interests. Ahmed cites Marx dozens of times throughout her text. She uses his ideas as the basis for her arguments regarding the economy of emotions and the commodification of both wounds and LGBTQ+ pleasures.
Sigmund Freud was a 19th-century Viennese neurologist known first and foremost as the founder of the field of psychoanalysis. He believed that human behavior is influenced by both conscious and unconscious forces and that the human psyche is divided into three parts: the ego, id, and superego. Freud’s ideas are foundational to Ahmed’s discussions of the operation of the ego ideal, the ideal other, and identification in creating emotional states and determining how they function.
Postcolonial theory studies the relationship between colonized peoples and their colonizers and how this relationship manifests in power structures, language, psychology, and behavior. Its influence on Ahmed is most obvious in her discussions of immigration, asylum seekers, and the psychology of racism. Feminist theory is concerned with the impact of patriarchal systems on people because of their identified sex and gender. Queer theory, as its name suggests, is an attempt to understand the world through the lens of queerness. With roots in post-structuralism, feminism, postcolonialism, and the Civil Rights Movement, queer theory arose in the 1980s as a response to the AIDS epidemic. Ahmed’s final two chapters are influenced by queer and feminist theory, but basic premises from these perspectives recur throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion.
