The Cultural Politics of Emotion

An “affective economy” is the circulation of emotions among people and signs. The idea of the affective economy draws from Marxist thinking about economies more broadly and applies this thinking to emotions as a medium of exchange. Ahmed suggests that, at minimum, hate and fear circulate in economies of this kind. This concept supports her depiction of Emotions as Social and Relational Practices.

According to Ahmed, emotions are performative relational practices that shape identity through repeated impressions on bodily surfaces. Although Ahmed is mainly interested in this complex definition of emotion through its action, she does offer a more succinct working definition in Chapter 8. For the purposes of her arguments regarding the artificial distinction between thought and emotion: Emotion is “embodied thought” (Location 3948 of 6419).

Fetishization is a term borrowed from Marxist theory. Marx used the term to refer to a form of reification in which relationships are attributed to commodity objects like money and goods instead of to the actions of people. When, in Chapter 1, Ahmed uses the term to apply to wounds, she makes a claim for wounds as a kind of commodity. In later chapters, she uses the term when she disputes claims that queer people and feminists necessarily fetishize their anger and pain, although in this usage her meaning is closer to “reification.”

Heteronormativity is a set of both implicit and explicit standards and beliefs that orders the world around attraction to the opposite sex and frames gender roles as innate, bioessentialist traits. This concept comes up throughout The Cultural Politics of Emotion but is a particular focus of Chapters 6, 7, and 8, when Ahmed discusses love, queer feelings, and feminist attachments. Heteronormativity is one example of the broader category of normativity; both concepts are important to understanding Ahmed’s contentions about The Relationship Between Emotion, Language, and Power and The Intersectionality of Emotion, Race, Gender, and Sexuality.

Freud’s concept of the “ideal other” involves the projection of an ideal onto a loved object through the process of idealization. The self longs to possess the ideal other through a form of love Freud called “anaclitic” love. In Freud’s original formulation, the ideal other is at first the opposite-sex parent and then, once a child matures, the parent becomes the heterosexual object of desire. Using a modified version of this concept, Ahmed builds her arguments about shame and the perpetuation of the nation through reproduction.

Identification is the process by which the ego ideal—the self that the self longs to be—is projected onto another. Identification, which Freud described as a kind of narcissistic love, draws the self toward the other as it engages in the process of trying to become more and more like the imagined ideal that in actuality emanates from the self. Freud imagined that the first process of identification occurs with the same-sex parent. The concept of identification is fundamental to Ahmed’s ideas about how emotion functions, particularly in her arguments that involve the individual’s relationship to the collective, including the nation.

Intensification is Ahmed’s own term for the mechanism through which emotions create impressions on the surfaces of bodies. Much of the groundwork for this idea comes from the work of Judith Butler on fixity, surfaces, and boundaries, which Butler calls “materialisation.”

Normativity is a cultural phenomenon by which a particular set of behaviors and dispositions are represented as natural and desirable. By extension, behaviors and dispositions that fall outside of these established guidelines are represented as unnatural and undesirable. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed advocates that those excluded by the representations of normativity should remain engaged with, instead of rejecting, normativity, with the hope of creating discomfort and reshaping norms.

Marxist theorist György Lukács coined the term “reification” to describe the confusion of abstractions with concrete objects. The term is closely related to “fetishization,” a term coined by Marx himself. Although Marx’s original meaning for “fetishization” was narrower, defined as one form of reification that applied only to commodities, today the two terms are often used interchangeably (See note on Ahmed’s usage in the entry “Fetishisation”).

Ressentiment, as Ahmed uses it, is a concept that originates in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche defined ressentiment as a kind of “slave morality” in which the subject’s feelings of resentment, weakness, and victimization are manifested as a moral system that reacts to the perceived cause of one’s frustration with angry judgment, rejecting its worth.