The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Sara Ahmed’s 2004 nonfiction text The Cultural Politics of Emotion is a seminal text in the field of critical affect theory. It asserts that emotion is socially constructed and examines the relationship between emotion and cultural beliefs. Ahmed’s ideas are strongly influenced by Marxism and by psychoanalytic, feminist, and queer theory, and she has devoted her writing and teaching career to these subjects. Ahmed has published 10 other books in the fields of feminist theory, queer theory, and critical studies and has authored dozens of journal articles in these areas.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Ahmed is particularly interested in how emotions contribute to identity and to preconceptions about women, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. Although Ahmed’s approach is philosophical rather than scientific, recent developments in the neuroscientific understanding of emotion tend to support her ideas.

This study guide refers to the Kindle e-book edition of the text’s second edition, published by Routledge in 2015. Citations are given in the form of location numbers throughout and do not reflect on any paginated version of the text.

The original text makes use of several British spellings that differ from standard American spellings; in quotations and the labeling of terms, the original British spellings have been preserved, but elsewhere the American spellings are used.