The Cultural Politics of Emotion

“But forming an impression also depends on how objects impress upon us. An impression can be an effect on the subject’s feelings (‘she made an impression’). It can be a belief (‘to be under an impression’). It can be an imitation or an image (‘to create an impression’). Or it can be a mark on the surface (‘to leave an impression’). We need to remember the ‘press’ in an impression. It allows us to associate the experience of having an emotion with the very affect of one surface upon another, an affect that leaves its mark or trace.”

Ahmed’s careful attention to language, her use of etymology to connect ideas, and her interest in the boundaries that delineate related words are evident as she explores both the noun-sense of “impression” through its “effects” and the verb-sense of its root word, “press,” as surfaces that “affect” one another. Her switch to the noun-sense of “affect” at the end of the passage, in constructions where the reader might ordinarily expect to see the word “effect,” playfully connects the bodily sense of emotion (affect) and the idea of influential interaction (effect), which lays groundwork for her later claims about Emotions as Social and Relational Practices and Emotions as Shapers of Identity.

“I become aware of my body as having a surface only in the event of feeling discomfort (prickly sensations, cramps) that become transformed into pain through an act of reading and recognition (‘it hurts!’), which is also a judgement (‘it is bad!’). The recognition of a sensation as being painful (from ‘it hurts’ to ‘it is bad’ to ‘move away’) also involves the reconstitution of bodily space, as the reorientation of the bodily relation to that which gets attributed as the cause of the pain.”

This is Ahmed’s first concrete example illustrating her claim that emotions create the surfaces of objects, which is a key part of her thematic claim about Emotions as Shapers of Identity. A familiar moment like stubbing one’s toe is an approachable and resonant example that makes it easier to understand this highly abstract claim.

“But the desperation of the mothers who are about to lose their children cuts through the scene and obscures it. I blink. I cannot see this before me. As I close my eyes, I come to hear. Sounds, screams. My ears tremble with the force of hearing those screams. Hearing the screams makes me shudder. The sounds of Fiona being taken away. The cries of Fiona’s mother.”

When Ahmed narrates her reading of Fiona’s story from Bringing Them Home, her voice changes dramatically. The lengthy, complex sentences, abstract vocabulary, and academic tone that characterize her argumentative voice disappear, replaced by shorter, highly varied sentence structures that incorporate fragments, simpler diction, repetition that creates rhythm and emphasis, and description and sibilance that convey her sensory experience. These choices create drama and a sense of immediacy. They also serve as a model of a point that Ahmed will make later, in Chapter 8, about the relationship of emotions to thought.

“Psychoanalysis allows us to see that emotions such as hate involve a process of movement or association, whereby ‘feelings’ take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. This is what I call the ‘rippling’ effect of emotions; they move sideways (through ‘sticky’ associations between signs, figures and objects) as well as forwards and backwards.”

Ahmed’s debt to Freudian theory is clear here, as she grounds her thematic claim regarding The Stickiness of Emotion in psychoanalytic claims that emotions move in all directions through a field of both conscious and unconscious signifiers. Her own contribution is the idea that emotions “stick” to some of these signs and associate them with one another. This addition will later bolster her thematic claims regarding The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality and The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power as she demonstrates how race, gender, and sexuality are targets of sticky negative emotions and this association is used to bolster pre-existing power structures.

“Hate involves a turning away from others that is lived as a turning towards the self.”

The parallel construction “turning away from others” / “turning towards the self” creates a pithy expression encapsulating several key take-aways from Chapter 2’s discussion of hate. Here, Ahmed distills into an almost aphoristic saying the ideas that hatred feels like a form of self-love, that it solidifies individual identity, and that it requires an object. Strategies like this encapsulate and summarize key ideas during Ahmed’s dense, abstract discussion.

“It is not simply that any body is hated: particular histories of association are reopened in each encounter, such that some bodies are already encountered as more hateful than other bodies.”

The construction “any body,” instead of the customary “anybody,” draws attention to the separate senses of the words “any” and “body,” emphasizing Ahmed’s insistence that it is classes of bodies, not specific human personalities, that are the focus of hatred. The repetition of “body” and “bodies,” “encounter” and “encountered,” “hated” and “hateful,” reinforces the idea of “histories of association,” a key idea contributing to the text’s thematic claims about The Stickiness of Emotion, Emotions as Social and Relational Practices, and The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

“One sweats, one’s heart races, one’s whole body becomes a space of unpleasant intensity, an impression that overwhelms us and pushes us back with the force of its negation.”

The anaphora Ahmed uses to link the three phrases at the beginning of her sentence creates a building rhythm mimicking the intensity and rising quality of fear itself. Breaking the anaphora in the next phrase emphasizes the word “impression.” This much longer, more static phrase lingers just as an impression lingers, and the dramatic diction “overwhelms,” “pushes,” and “force” mimics the intense feelings that linger after a frightening encounter.

“The sideways movement of fear (where we have a metonymic and sticky relation between signs) is also a backwards movement: objects of fear become substituted for each other over time.”

Here, Ahmed makes clear what role metonymy plays in her thematic conception of The Stickiness of Emotion. Metonymy, as a rhetorical technique, involves substituting an associated sign for the sign that is actually meant—using the nickname “Hoops” for a basketball player, for instance. The existence of metonymy in language reflects the mind’s tendency to “stick” things together in this way; Ahmed proposes that this naturally extends with emotions and their objects.

“Vulnerability is not an inherent characteristic of women’s bodies; rather, it is an effect that works to secure femininity as a delimitation of movement in the public, and over-inhabitance in the private.”

One of Ahmed’s key thematic ideas is The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power. Emotions and the language used to express them impact different classes of bodies in different ways, depending on their power within the society. In her discussion of the attribution of vulnerability to female bodies, Ahmed demonstrates that pre-existing structures of power create the feeling of vulnerability around female bodies to limit their movement. This argument demonstrates The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

“At the same time, the native is read as being disgusted by the texture of the white man’s food, a reading which […] assumes access to the interiority of the native body.”

Ahmed uses the passive construction “is read” in reference to the native to emphasize Darwin’s view of the native as a possessable object whose interiority is Darwin’s to construct as he desires. This contributes to the case she is building regarding The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power, Emotions as Shapers of Identity, and The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality. As with her earlier discussion of fear and the female body, she is attempting to show how disgust is used to limit and define the non-white body.

“The images that appeared on television screens of the event as it unfolded, and which were repeated after the event, were images of trauma. They were also traumatic images.”

The antimetabole in “images of trauma” and “traumatic images” draws attention to the way in which repeated viewings of trauma suffered by others constitutes its own form of trauma. This repetitive structure and the ideas it conveys work together to reinforce Ahmed’s point about the iterative nature of the performativity of disgust and demonstrate how the subtopic of disgust relates to her larger thematic claims about Emotions as Social and Relational Practices.

“The very physicality of shame—how it works on and through bodies—means that shame also involves the de-forming and re-forming of bodily and social spaces, as bodies ‘turn away’ from the others who witness the shame.”

The emphasis on the physicality of shame and on the way it functions among bodies in both physical and social space contributes to Ahmed’s thematic point regarding Emotions as Social and Relational Practices. The diction “de-forming and “re-forming,” and the nonstandard use of hyphens to separate “forming” from the prefixes “de” and “re” draw attention to the sense of identity being shaped by shame, supporting Ahmed’s thematic claim about Emotions as Shapers of Identity.

“While the child may be ashamed before another, she or he may also be excited by that very other, such that the child may peep and look at another through the hands that cover the face.”

Here, Ahmed uses another concrete and relatable example to help clarify a highly abstract idea. The image of the ashamed child peeking at a loved one from behind their hands illustrates that shame is ambivalent in its action of drawing the self both away from and toward a loved object.

“Shame binds us to others in how we are affected by our failure to ‘live up to’ those others, a failure that must be witnessed, as well as be seen as temporary, in order to allow us to re-enter the family or community.”

Throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed creates strategic moments of review before moving on to new sections of argument. This sentence, which occurs at the end of roughly five pages of argument delineating the essential form and functioning of shame, serves to sum up the key elements of those five pages of argument before Ahmed moves on to arguments about how shame functions at the national scale.

“My concern is not to define ‘what is love’ or to map the relation between these different kinds of love. Rather, I want to consider how the pull of love towards an other, who becomes an object of love, can be transferred towards a collective, expressed as an ideal or object.”

In the book’s Introduction, Ahmed clarifies her project: She will make arguments about how emotions function, because she is more interested in what they do than in what they are. Specifically, she is interested in Emotions as Social and Relational Practices. Accordingly, as she introduces her arguments about love, she proposes to talk about the function of love as a relational practice, not to define and categorize the emotion.

“One could even think of national love as a form of waiting.”

This direct and memorable sentence marks a turning point in Ahmed’s arguments regarding love. Up until this point, she has argued in detail about how love is an example of Emotions as Shapers of Identity in the way that it manifests between individuals. She is just beginning to delve into how this love can be transferred onto the collective, and by placing the word “waiting” in the high-value spot at the end, this sentence emphasizes the specific aspect of transference onto the collective that will be her main focus: namely, the futurity of this transference and the way that this futurity shapes love’s action in The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power and The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

“The reliance on the other as the origin of injury becomes an ongoing investment in the failure of return.”

Here, Ahmed stresses that national love requires scapegoats by its very nature: The nation cannot return love in the way that the self requires, the self is threatened by this absence of reciprocity, and to preserve the identification with its ideal, the self must have a narrative of obstruction by others. Her use of italics draws attention to a critical aspect of this idea: Scapegoating becomes another form of investment. Because Ahmed has already established that the self resists walking away from bad investments and generally chooses to double-down on them instead, this has significant implications for the persistence and intensification of hatred against scapegoated groups.

“Bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force.”

Throughout the text, Ahmed has made the point that bodies are impacted by the operation of emotions. Here, she clarifies the mechanism of impact: It is the repetition of norms, enforced through emotion, that shapes what bodies are allowed to be and become.

“Normativity is comfortable for those who can inhabit it. The word ‘comfort’ suggests wellbeing and satisfaction, but it also suggests an ease and easiness.”

Ahmed uses the idea of comfort and ease to explain how the space within norms comes to be viewed as a safe or “sanitized” space. This is important to her arguments about The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality, because the existence of a sanitized space bounded by norms implies that whatever exists outside the boundary—queerness, for example—is “dirty” and unsafe.

“We can see here that the cultural politics of emotion is deeply bound up with gendered histories of imperialism and capitalism, in which violence against the bodies of subaltern women is both granted and taken for granted in the making of worlds.”

Ahmed uses the harsh negative reaction to Sunera Thobani’s critique of the War on Terror to illustrate The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power and The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality. The imperial and capitalist forces that created the dominant worldview of the West allowed for the shaping of narratives in which violence against subaltern women is both acceptable and inevitable. Thobani is perceived as a more legitimate target for violent speech and action because of her sex and ethnic background.

“As I have suggested throughout this book, the ‘truths’ of this world are dependent on emotions, on how they move subjects, and stick them together.”

Summative sentences such as this help to clarify where Ahmed is in her argument and how her ideas relate to one another. Here, Ahmed signals that she has moved on from the arguments that typify Chapters 1-6—the form and function of various emotions—to a consideration of the implications of emotions’ form and function for the lives of queer and feminist subjects.

“Is a just response to injustice about having more ‘just emotions’, or is justice never ‘just’ about emotions?”

Ahmed’s homographic punning on the word “just” draws attention to the word’s multiple meanings and stresses its importance, particularly in combination with the repetitive sound of “justice” and “injustice.” This has the effecting of calling into question the practice of dismissing emotions as “merely” emotion, because emotions can be “just” or “unjust” and thus have significant moral weight.

“When the affective turn becomes a turn to affect, feminist and queer work are no longer positioned as part of that turn.”

Ahmed employs the antimetabole of “affective turn” and “turn to affect” to draw attention to the importance of language and to demonstrate how easily it can be used to enfranchise and disenfranchise. This continues the text’s emphasis on The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power, as Ahmed is critiquing the effort among some critics to reconstruct the idea of the affective turn as something separate from the queer and feminist theory where it originated.