The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Unlike previous chapters, Chapter 7’s introduction begins with the discussion of a quote not from a popular public text but from an academic source: R T Goodman’s Infertilities: Exploring Fictions of Barren Bodies. Ahmed uses this text as a reminder of her previous point that biological reproduction is often conflated with perpetuation of the social ideal. The traditional family is portrayed as vulnerable and in need of defense. Heterosexuality between white men and women becomes a prescribed means of defending both the status quo and its future. Immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and mixed-race couples are stuck together into a threatening object. These narratives shape the identities and bodies of both those who obey their prescriptions and those who contradict them. Ahmed compares the workings of these regulatory norms to physical labor that, in repeatedly impressing on and orienting bodies in a prescribed manner, creates a kind of “repetitive strain injury” and contorts bodies “into shapes that enable some action only insofar as they restrict capacity for other kinds of action” (Location 3362 of 6419). Heteronormativity is one such regulatory norm.

Heterosexuality, Ahmed argues, is not simply a matter of one’s chosen sexual partners. It is an investment in the perpetuation of heterosexuality as a norm permeating and structuring the collective. The assumption of heterosexuality as the default grants some selves repeated affirmation through the collective’s normative rituals and narratives while it cuts off other selves from this same affirmation. Queer bodies can be injured as they repeatedly experience failure to live up to the collective’s ideal and as they are repeatedly made uncomfortable in spaces that do not “fit” them. Unlike comfort, which allows the self to meld seamlessly with its environment, discomfort brings the self’s attention back to the surface of the body and its separateness from its surroundings. The norm of heterosexuality that permeates social spaces vanishes from the attention of the heterosexual self because the “fit” is perfect, while it functions as a constant, disorienting reminder to the homosexual self of its lack of belonging. Queer people are often even expected to contribute their own labor to the maintenance of heterosexual comfort by refraining from any public expression of self that contradicts heteronormativity.

Because different norms tend to stick together and reinforce each other, creating “legitimate” and “illegitimate” ways of living, queer theory takes a stance not just against heteronormativity but against normativity more generally. Ahmed proposes that, when it comes to accepting or rejecting norms, a close examination of queer attachments can help resolve the apparent either-or choice of assimilation versus transgression. She points out that different queer bodies have access to different kinds of queer spaces and that not even in these queer spaces can queer bodies be guaranteed a good fit; intersectionalities of race, class, and so on can impinge on a queer person’s sense of comfort in queer spaces. A negative definition of freedom, as preferred by prominent voices in queer theory—the freedom from all norms—idealizes a particular way of living through movement and detachment and becomes yet another way to exclude certain queer selves from comfort and belonging.

Ahmed contends that although normative attachments in general may support heteronormativity, they are still important in many queer lives and can be used to intensify the social work that queerness can accomplish. By inhabiting hereronormative spaces that they do not fit seamlessly into, queer bodies highlight the gaps between their bodies and the space they inhabit, encouraging the reworking of these spaces. These acts of positive transgression have the potential of “queering” heteronormative spaces. Ahmed acknowledges that not all queer bodies have equal access to or interest in this kind of positive transgression. Just as with negative transgression in the form of rejecting all norms, intersectional identities influence the options that are available and appealing to individual queer selves.

In rejecting queerness, heteronormative culture rejects its own potential for queerness. This rejection results in an unacknowledged grief that prevents heteronormative culture from grieving the loss of actual queer bodies and loves because it insists on a reading of queer life as “non-life.” Because of this, queer activism responding to the AIDS epidemic created forms of collective mourning and made mourning the loss of queer lives in public spaces a political action. Ahmed examines the public mourning after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and points out that these memorials tried to replace the sudden absence of the dead with the presence of memorials—and yet they obscured certain deaths while privileging others in a kind of hierarchy of grief. In response to heteronormative descriptions of the dead in terms of their nuclear family relationships, queer activists highlighted the deaths of queer bodies, framing them as losses to the queer community. Ahmed critiques one of these responses for the ways its language allows queer losses to become a part of the very national narrative that erases queer deaths, suggesting that queer grief should be closely examined to find an alternative framing.

She introduces Freud’s distinction between mourning and melancholia: In mourning, one lets go of the lost object, while in melancholia one attempts to hold on by bringing the lost object into the self. Ahmed challenges Freud’s assumption that letting go is the healthier response. Melancholia can be a healthy process of gradually renegotiating the meaning of the loss and may in fact allow for new attachments rather than being an obstacle to them. It may well be the more ethical of the two options, as taking the lost object into the self allows it to live on into the present. Ahmed refines this concept of “taking in” by suggesting that relationships between loved ones inevitably involve prolonged processes of resurfacing as each body makes impressions upon the other; in a sense, then, even before a loss the loved one is a part of the self and melancholia simply preserves these already existing impressions. Queer forms of grief can focus on sustaining these impressions without allowing queer grief to be co-opted into inherently anti-queer national narratives.

Ahmed closes the chapter with a consideration of queer pleasure and attempts by heteronormative culture to steal or prevent this joy because of its own investment in queer suffering and the perception that queer joy is unearned. Ahmed contends that queer politics should challenge this treatment of pleasure as a form of property that one earns as a reward for appropriate behavior and enjoys only in appropriate ways. The recent commodification of queer pleasures as a part of the global economy may well have a liberating effect, but Ahmed believes that queer pleasure can also work to challenge social norms. Pleasure, like pain, draws attention to the body’s surface—but unlike pain, pleasure opens and expands the self. Shared pleasures indicate belonging to the collective. When queer bodies exhibit pleasure in heteronormative spaces, it creates discomfort and challenges the heteronormative narrative. When queer bodies share pleasure with one another, they resurface and liberate bodies that may have been previously shaped by pain.