Feeling the rules: Historical and contemporary perspectives on emotional norms and social distinction

Abstract

Abstract Feeling rules are norms surrounding emotions, particularly emotional expressions in social contexts, and are a well-known aspect of human societies in both the past and present. As a subdiscipline, the history of emotions has found great profit in tracking changing feeling rules over time to better understand social formations. Emotional norms are culturally, geographically, and socially specific, providing coherence to communities or serving as instruments of distinction within them. Yet some historians have found a sole focus on the normative insufficient for grasping, in their entirety, the historical aspects of emotions and their specific functions. This special issue suggests some new ways to think about escaping the dualism of emotional norms and emotional experiences – or, put more broadly, of structure and subjectivity – without privileging either as the determining factor in shaping social relations. To show the interrelations between rules and experiences, we draw from sociological work on taste and social distinction, arguing that emotions become socially potent and drivers of historical change by being both means and objects of value judgments. This introduction provides an overview of feelings rules and emotional norms in the history of emotions, connects these to work in the sociology of taste, and introduces the case studies in the special issue.