The Cultural Politics of Emotion

One of Ahmed’s key ideas in The Cultural Politics of Emotion is The Stickiness of Emotion—the contention that the circulation of emotions creates strong associations between certain objects, causing these objects to be treated as inseparable facets of a unified whole. The idea that emotions have objects has a long history within the philosophical analysis of emotion and so, to a degree, Ahmed treats this idea as a given. The nature of these objects, however, has long been the subject of debate, and Ahmed considers this in the book’s Introduction. Her discussion of Descartes’ ideas here advances the idea that objects themselves do not cause particular emotions but instead are assigned emotional significance. Establishing that it is emotions that act on their objects rather than objects that create emotions is an important precondition for Ahmed’s argument, because it establishes directionality. Emotions act to stick objects together—the objects are not stuck together as a natural result of their own production of similar emotions.

Having established that emotions become associated with objects but do not inherently emanate from the objects themselves, Ahmed moves on to establishing that, as emotions circulate, they tend to “stick” some objects together: “The ‘characteristics’ of one figure get displaced or transferred onto the other” (Location 1164 of 6419). One example she offers is the disparate objects bound together as objects of hate for right-wing fascist groups. This stickiness operates through the implied meanings found in repetitive narratives and social histories. In her discussion of disgust, Ahmed notes “I want to expand our understanding of the historicity implicit to signification, reconceiving historicity in terms of stickiness as well as repetition: stickiness […] [relates] to the attachments that implicitly govern ways in which signs work with other signs,” explicitly tying history, repetition, implicit signification, and the action of stickiness together (Location 2181 of 6419).

Finally, Ahmed shows how being stuck together by histories and narratives causes different objects to be treated as if they were one and the same, parts of a unified whole. In her discussion of the affective economy of hate, for instance, she says that “hate works by sticking ‘figures of hate’ together, transforming them into a common threat” (Location 394 of 6419). She shows how various kinds of migrants are stuck together and treated as undeserving or threatening regardless of their actual individual characteristics. She also uses the example of racism as a demonstration of how individual objects become grouped together by emotion and treated as if they are a unified whole.

Ahmed argues that emotions shape identity at both the individual and collective levels. Through repeated impressions, emotions shape bodies and their identities, teaching people what they are allowed to do and be. Emotions can also move individual bodies toward or away from collectives and either threaten or reinforce a group’s collective identity.

Ahmed advances the first section of this thematic argument in the book’s Introduction. Her discussion of David Hume’s concept of impressions proposes that emotions make impressions on bodies by pressing against them and leaving “a mark on the surface” (Location 179 of 6419). Because the affective economy circulates emotions in patterns, these impressions tend to be repetitive: “Emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time,” she points out (Location 179 of 6419). Ahmed means this both literally and figuratively: Emotion can shape a person in both a physical and psychic sense. In Chapter 3, for instance, she points out how fear can impact a person physically by decreasing their mobility and causing them to shrink in on themselves. In her discussions of racism throughout the book, she notes how emotion can impact a person psychically: Experiencing others’ hate or disgust can dramatically lower a person’s self-esteem. These examples also demonstrate the action of emotions to shape a person’s understanding of what they are allowed to do or be.

Ahmed also proposes that emotions can shape the individual’s orientation to the collective and the identity of the collective itself. In Chapter 5’s discussion of shame, she notes how shame temporarily alienates the self from the collective as the self questions its own worth after its failure to meet a collective ideal. She also examines how shame can be used to reconstruct a collective identity, as in the case of the Australian people’s reactions to the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. Her arguments related to fear also explore its impact on both the individual relationship to the collective and the collective’s group identity. Fear, she suggests, can motivate an individual to identify with the collective: “[F]ear may even allow some bodies to occupy more space through the identification with the collective body, which stands in for the individual body, and moves on its behalf” (Location 1729 of 6419). Her discussions of the War on Terror and rhetoric around immigration demonstrate that fear can also be used to construct a group identity around the exclusion of an imagined threat.

“Intersectionality,” in the context of critical theory, is the consideration of how multiple sources of discrimination accumulate and impact people. One of the main themes that Ahmed builds toward in The Cultural Politics of Emotion is The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality. She contends that emotion acts on different bodies differently according to social histories and norms and that marginalized identities have a cumulative effect on how emotion impacts people.

The first stage of her argument involves demonstrating that emotion acts differently on different bodies. In her discussion of pain, she notes that it may be “felt differently by different bodies” (Location 655 of 6419); because bodies may experience the same emotion differently, an emotion will necessarily impact them in different ways. Another type of difference—and one more significant to her argument—is in the types of emotions that tend to be directed toward certain bodies more than others. As Ahmed points out in her discussion of hate, some emotions tend to operate through signs of difference; existing power structures create narratives of inclusion and exclusion, and women, ethnic and cultural minorities, migrants, and members of the LGBTQ+ community tend to suffer various degrees and kinds of exclusion, often resulting in their designation as objects of hate. Her analyses of Audre Lorde’s anecdote about the white woman’s hate and disgust and Frantz Fanon’s anecdote about the white child’s fear—and the fear it inspired in the adult Fanon—make clear how significantly people are impacted by becoming the objects of negative emotions. The members of communities “stuck together” as objects of fear need do nothing as individuals to inspire these negative emotions. Merely by existing in their own bodies, they become the targets of hate, fear, and disgust.

In the book’s final chapter, Ahmed discusses the experiences of Sunera Thobani, a Tanzanian immigrant to Canada, after she criticized the tactics of the War on Terror and was viciously attacked in the media and threatened with violence as a result. Ahmed comments that “[w]e 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” (Location 3934 of 6419). It is Thobani’s combined status as both a woman and a “subaltern” that creates the extremity of the backlash against her ideas. The similarities in Ahmed’s discussions of how emotions function in queer and feminist communities, in Chapters 7 and 8 respectively, is another marker of how similar Ahmed finds their situations to be and suggests that the experiences of one group often mimic the experiences of the other. In this case, emotional experiences are likely to be repeated and to have a cumulative effect for individuals identified with more than one minority status.