The sociology of emotions in a contested environmental illness case: how gender and the sense of community contribute to conflict

Abstract

Communities often experience contention when confronted with environmental threats and diverging interpretations of risk. Contested illness research often describes the emotional expression of individuals without analyzing how these emotions connect to larger social factors such as sense of community, gender, and assumptions about an emotion–logic dichotomy. This research incorporates the sociology of emotion to explore how the social construction of emotions influences dissension in a contested illness case. I investigate the case of The Acreage, Florida where a cancer cluster was established but an environmental cause was not found. This paper discusses how the sense of community and gender role expectations gave rise to expressions of fear, anger, and grief using data drawn from 57 in-depth interviews of current and former residents of The Acreage. Findings suggest that disparate ‘feeling rules’ related to one’s sense of community, perceptions of what neighbors feel, and gendered notions of emotion and logic contribute to community dissension. This paper thus identifies conditions that give rise to divergent emotional experiences and expressions that exacerbate community dissension.