EMOTIONAL BODIES

Will Kurlinkus
Add Images to Your Midterms
Kinlock Introduction Layout
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How does emotion appear in your
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Introduction
¨  Communities of emotion (emotional literacy, emotional citizenship, emotional
publics): “Aligning subjects with collectives by attributing ‘others’ as the ‘source’ of
our feelings” (1).
¨  Emotion vs. Logic: emotions are feminine, natural, reactive rather than active, a risk.
¤  At the same time, there is a hierarchy of emotions (some are good and some are bad),
e.g. righteous anger vs. crying.
¨  Emotional Circulation/Affective Economy: Emotion is not an inherent feature of
bodies (subjects or objects). It is not only a bodily response (affect) nor only an
appraisal of the world (emotion). It is “an orientation towards others….reading the
contact we have with objects in a certain way” (4). It is both psychological and
sociological.
¤  Emotions are omnitemporal: past experience/memories + contact with an object
(impression) in the present + what we imagine might happen from contact that hasn’t
happened yet
¤  Emotions circulate: involve movement/orientation away or towards. They stop some people
and urge action in others.
¤  Emotions are sticky: they get attached to things and accumulate on things.
¤  Emotions create surfaces (inside and outside) through contact/impressions. They transform
surrounding bodies.
Emotions are new materialist: Emotions circulate around us—not just connected to our bodies
and the bodies of others but objects, environments, places. They are exchanged, accumulated,
and stuck to things. We contact the world through them + we are them. When we have contact
with others emotions, they mediate that contact but the emotions themselves change too.
1. The Contingency of Pain
¨  We form identity through emotional contact with others: “It is through
sensual experiences such as pain that we come to have a sense of our skin
as bodily surface…as something that keeps us apart from others, and as
something that ‘mediates’ the relationship between internal or external
inside and outside” (24). (term surfacing)
¤  “Life experience involve multiple collisions with objects and others. It is through
such collisions that I form a sense of myself as (more or less) apart from others,
as well as a sense of the surfaces of my body” (26).
¨  Pain is something we want to eject from our bodies: “I want the pain to
leave me…The wound functions as a trace of where the surface of another
entity (however imaginary) has impressed upon the body” (27).
¨  Sociality of Pain: “It is the apparent loneliness of pain that requires it to be
disclosed to a witness…because no one can know what it feels like to
have my pain that i want loved others to acknowledge how I feel” (29). The
ethics of pain is how I respond to pain in others that I can never know.
¨  The transformation of wound into identity (risks a generalized wound
culture—the wounded white male subject has more access to public
resources/press)
Pain Scales
Pain Scales
 2. The Organisation of Hate
¨  Hate!Love: “It is a common theme within so-called hate groups to declare themselves
organisations of love on their web sites….because we love, we hate, and this hate is what
brings us together” (42).
¤  Hate Protects: “Such narratives work by generating a subject that is endangered by imagined
others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs,
security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject” (43).
¨  Affective Economy: “emotions do not positively inhabit anybody or anything…the
subject is simply one nodal point in the economy” (46).
¤  Stickiness of emotion: Story about man being punished for shooting a boy that enters his home
+ story about asylum seeker=immigrants being protected more than citizens: “the nation…has
the right to expel asylum seekers (whatever the means) who as burglars are tying to steal
somethign from the nation” (47).
¨  Hate as Ambivalent: “an investment in an object (of hate) whereby the object becomes
part of the life of the subject even though (or perhaps because) its threat is perceived as
coming from outside” (50). Hyperfocus as opposed to just ignoring.
¤  “Hate involves a turning away from others that is lived as a turning towards the self” (51)
¤  “Hate is a negative attachment to an other that one wishes to expel, an attachment that is
sustained through the expulsion of the other from bodily and social proximity” (55)
3. The Affective Politics of Fear
¨  How does fear present itself in the composition classroom?
¨  “Statements of fear tell the other that they are the ‘cause’ of fear, in a way
that is personal….Fear works by establishing others as fearsome insofar as
they threaten to take the self in” (62-64).
¨  Future oriented: “Fear involves an anticipation of hurt or injury…impresses
upon us in hte presente, as an anticipated pain in the future” (65).
¨  Fear vs. Anxiety: “Anxiety becomes an approach to objects rather than, as
with fear, being produced by an object’s approach” (66).
¨  Fear + Openness: “Fear involves reading such openings as dangerous; the
openness of the body to the world involves a sense of danger, which is
anticipate as a future pain or injury” (69).
¨  “Fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement of expansion of
others” (69).
¤  Teaching women to fear (shrink to the home but also to protect)
¤  The production of crisis justifies political response (airport security, borders)
4. The Performativity of Disgust
¨  Disgust involves pulling away (but you had to be close in
the first place) and it involves a rage that we could
have gotten close enough to be affected (85).
¤  Often it is disgust at a slippage of borders (things have
gotten in) and we spit/vomit
¤  Metonymic slide: emotion slides from one piece of
something to another. A piece comes to represent the whole.
(a family gaining stigma from one member).
¤  Stickiness: emotions and associations stick. Stigma sticks to
us from friendships with others. Also the histories of emotions,
bodies, objects, signs stick and echo. Things get bound
together.
5. Shame Before Others
¨  Shame: How the self feels about the self—need to hide from the other.
Feeling exposed. Witnessed in failure. We have failed to approximate an
ideal.
¤  We imagine what the witness would think of us. Project ourselves outside looking
in.
¨  Communities of Shame: “Declarations of shame can bring ‘the nation’ into
existence as a felt community….To acknowledge wrongdoing means to
enter into shame; the ‘we’ is shamed by its recognition that it has committed
‘acts and omissions’ which have caused pain, hurt, and loss for indigenous
others” (101).
¤  If you feel shame you are part of the group
¤  “By witnessing what is shameful about the past, the nation can live up to the
ideals that secure its identity or being in the present. In other words, our shame
means that we mean well” (109). (shame is past oriented—not critical of self in
the present)
¤  The irony of shame: National shames are injust because they take away our
ability to feel national pride (not because someone was hurt).
6. In the Name of Love
¨  Love: “A way of bonding with others in relation to an ideal, which
takes shape as an effect of such bonding. Love is crucial to how
indivudals become aligned with collectives through their identification
with an ideal, an alignment that relies on the existence of others who
have failed tat ideal” (124).
¤  Love makes the subject exposed to the loved other.
¤  “The lover and the object approximate an ideal, an approximation
which binds them together.” (129).
¨  When one extends love to others who are recognized as different
“one gets to see oneself as a good or tolerant subject” (133)
¤  Remember cell phones and aid: “Identifying oneself as British means
defining the conditions of the love one can or will give to others” (134).
7. Queer Feelings
¨  Normal: “Bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with
force….norms surface as the surfaces of bodies; norms are a matter of impressions,
of how bodies are impressed upon by the world, as a world made up of
others” (145)
¨  Casual modes of conversation: “do you have a girlfriend to a boy”
¨  “Normativity is comfortable for those who can inhabit it….To be comfortable is to
be so at east with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body
ends and the world begins” (147)
¤  Vs. “out of place”
¤  “Discomfort is not simply a choice or a decision….but an effect of bodies inhabiting spaces
that do not take or extend their shape”
¨  Why Doesn’t Ahmed like Happiness?: “My childhood was full of the attempt to
use happiness to stop us talking about difficult things; it really mattered to me to
make that critique and to work out the way in which happiness worked in my own
childhood and upbringing to generate a particular idea of the family. If you didn’t
maintain or retain that idea of the family that meant you were losing proximity to
happiness.” —interview
8. Feminist Attachments
¨  Emotion=Womanly/Weak: “Feminists who speak out against
established ‘truths’ are often constructed as emotional, as failing the
very standards of reason and impartiality that are assumed to form
the basis of ‘good judgment’” (170).
¨  Three feminist emotions
¤  Anger: “The response to pain, as a call to action, also requires anger;
an interpretation that this pain is wrong, that it is an outrage, and that
something must be done about it….If anger pricks our skin, if it makes us
shudder, swet and tremble, then it might just shudder us into new ways of
being” (175)
¤  Wonder: “works to transform the ordinary, which is already recognised,
into the extraordinary” (179). An opening up to possibility.
¤  Hope: “it is hope that makes involvement in direct forms of polical
activism enjoyable: the sense that gahering toghetr is bout opening up
the world….about the possibilities of the future” (184)