Emotional Economy Research Articles

Burning Our Fingers: An Intersectional Grapple with the Steel Cage of Racism

This article argues that a focus on racialized emotional economies is crucial to cultivating antiracist programs and an antiracist field. This study is framed around a racist fuck-up. We provide a framework and recommendations for ways that administrators, scholars, and educators can attend to emotions more directly within academic spaces.

Emotional Economy and Influence Dynamics in 'Woman and Doll': A Social Exchange Perspective"

This paper explores the application of George C. Homans' Social Exchange Theory to the Manipuri folktale "Woman and Doll." The study aims to demonstrate how Homans' propositions regarding behavioral psychology, economic exchange, influence dynamics, and small group structure elucidate the underlying social behaviors. The folktale centers on a rich widow's daughter who bonds intensely with a doll, impacting her social interactions and marriage. The study explores her behavior, reflecting Homans' concept of seeking rewards and avoiding costs. It also views her attachment to the doll and subsequent social isolation as an economic exchange. Further, there is an analysis of the influence dynamics when the daughter gains a unique ability, altering the balance of social exchanges in her favor. The small group structure shifts as she integrates into her husband's home, achieving equilibrium through her newfound influence.

Emotional economies of pleasure among the gentry of eighteenth-century England

ABSTRACT This article analyses familial cultures and exchanges of pleasure among 11 eighteenth-century gentry families. The research is based on a substantial collection of family correspondence and identifies emotion words within these letters to understand familial conversations about pleasure and the various purposes that pleasure was put to. Here pleasure is problematised and studied as an emotion. There are three main arguments. Firstly, the letters reveal a previously hidden world of family pleasure, connected to but in some ways remote from the public and sensory pleasures of the urban renaissance that most previous studies have focused on. The letters reveal an emotional economy of pleasure, where feelings materialised as currencies underlying the building and breaking of family relationships. Secondly, pleasure was not a singular or solitary feeling, but rather operated in affective clusters with other emotions such as anxiety and surprise. Finally, pleasure and displeasure were vital in keeping good order among the gentry and between the gentry and their subordinates, within inheritance systems and family dynamics where inequality and an unequal distribution of resources were part of everyday life.

Социальные установки общества переживаний и логика потребительского поведения как факторы корреляции

This article comprehensively examines and analyzes the historical and cultural context of the transformation of a formerly consumer society into a society of impressions (“a society of experiences”), analyzed from J. Baudrillard and G. Debord to G. Schulze, whose work of the same name made a significant contribution to the process of understanding the causes of change in the attitudes of consumer behavior recorded over the past decades. Developed by G. Schulze, the social concept of “consumption of experiences” of members of modern society is studied from the point of view of the growing crisis of the previous models of mass consumption, which are increasingly ceasing to meet the requirements of modernity. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the features of further development of all these ideas in the form of the emerging counter-culture of anti-consumerism, criticism of overconsumption and a number of psychologizing approaches to the study and search for solutions to the problems of the emerging “emotional economy” in its application to the broader concept of “emotional capitalism” in that form as it is presented in a number of works of domestic and foreign authors.

Fear, helplessness, pain, anger: The narrated emotions of intimate femicide perpetrators in Latin America

While studies of femicide perpetrators have focused on background factors, such as criminal history and mental health conditions, little attention has been paid to their individual experiences. Perpetrators emotions and sense-making have often been overlooked and even dismissed. With a micro-sociological approach to violence, we identify the narrated emotions involved in the perpetration of intimate femicide. The data gathered are based on 33 open-ended interviews with convicted male perpetrators from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela. We identify four main emotions reflecting participants’ experiences of femicide: Fear, expressed through stories of women as threats to self, family, and community; helplessness, expressed through stories of men being trapped, judged, and persecuted; and pain, connected to stories of jealousy and belittlement. These lead to anger, expressed through stories of bodily reactions and losing control. The findings indicate that intimate femicide perpetrators resort to lethal violence to regulate self-worth and remediate actions they feel were disruptive. Our research demonstrates the importance of embodied and narrated emotions to understand femicides. We argue that viewing femicide as a product of a shared pervasive emotional economy highlights the role of emotions in maintaining a gendered social order.

Disclosure as family practice: Changing family dynamics in Hong Kong after a gay son comes out

AbstractThis paper examines the family dynamics between parents and gay sons after the latter's disclosure of their sexual orientation. Situated in the “doing family” and life course literature, the paper offers a sociological account of coming out and family dynamics in Hong Kong that presents the narratives of both gay sons and their parents, examining the changing moral and emotional economies of family life across two generations. Thirty‐five in‐depth individual interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of gay sons (n = 15) and their mothers (n = 14) and/or fathers (n = 6). The findings revealed that heteronormative family life, as part of the moral economy of family life, is challenged after disclosure, with parents forced to admit or accept the queer component of their family. Yet, both parents and gay sons work hard to accomplish a “correct” version of sexual normativity that views homosexuality as inborn (sexual essentialism) and conforms to the “good homosexual” image. Sons' disclosure also shifts the burden of the closet, as part of the emotional economy of family life, to their parents, especially mothers, on whom that burden often takes an emotional toll. The paper concludes that disclosure is a contested site of negotiation of the meaning of male identity, parenthood, and homosexuality, as well as a key family practice that changes the moral and emotional economies of families, eventually leading to the formation of new family forms. By viewing disclosure as family practice in a culture where intergenerational closeness and family co‐residence are prominent, this paper rethinks coming out, arguing that in the Chinese context it should be understood not only as identity politics, as it often is in Western contexts, but also as relational politics, thus revitalizing the coming‐out debate across cultural contexts and offering new insights on the relationship between homosexuality and contemporary family life.

Transfer patterns in the Swedish football clubs – a gift economy of loyalties and emotions

ABSTRACT This article explores how football players and scouts in Sweden narrate their stories of transfers within the Swedish football system. This article presents first-person narrations as male players as well as scouts from elite clubs were interviewed in connection to transfer patters to, from and within Sweden. The aim is to analyse how the transfer system takes shape in stories presented by scouts and players, and what it can tell about the football transfer market. The interviewed persons present story logic while constructing a narrative of transfer patterns. Theoretically, the study is framed using Marcel Mauss concept of gift economy.

Thanatographical fiction: Death, mourning and ritual in contemporary literature and film

In recent years, many authors around the world have taken on the difficult task of commemorating the unmourned dead caused by wars, terrorism or structural violence, or of giving them a literary burial. Their fictions, which I will call thanatographical fiction in the following, play a central role for the collective imaginary in that they provide an archive of knowledge on how violent death and grief are processed. The study of a comparative corpus shows that there is a transcultural and transmedial poetics of grief that serves to frame and channel emotions, to give them a form that allows access to them without sparking further excess. What I aim to demonstrate is that the common grounds of fictions from such diverse places as France, Québec, Senegal and Ukraine are that they can illustrate processes of the economy of emotions: in order to address the subject of violent death, they have to resort to different strategies of emotion control. By modulating emotions, texts and films influence both the regulation of grief and commemoration on one hand, and on the other, the reinforcement of collective identities. They can thus provide an instrument for reflecting on the interaction of grief and violence to gain a better understanding of it. I will thus analyse Wajdi Mouawad’s tetralogy of plays Le sang des promesses, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s novel De purs hommes, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s film Atlantis and Julie Ruocco’s novel Furies to elaborate a first draft of a thanatographical poetics of grief.

The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality

<i>The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality</i>

Happiness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Mary Hatfield, and: The Emotional Economy of Holidaymaking: Health, Pleasure, and Class in Britain, 1870–1918 by Yaara Benger Alaluf (review)

Happiness in Nineteenth-Century Ireland ed. by Mary Hatfield, and: The Emotional Economy of Holidaymaking: Health, Pleasure, and Class in Britain, 1870–1918 by Yaara Benger Alaluf (review)

Tarrying with Trauma While Improvising Gender in Who Do You Think You Are?

Alice Munro’s 1978 collection of linked stories, Who Do You Think You Are? enacts what Lorraine York calls Munro’s theory of fiction as “tarrying with difficult emotions and knowledges.” Judith Butler’s seminal 1988 theory of gender performativity postulated that improvising gender incurs obvious and covert social punishments, but that performing gender includes the possibility of innovation. Rose, the protagonist, succumbs to and contests norms imposed on women in the southwestern Ontario township of Huron County during the 1940s to 1970s. This thesis explores Rose surviving punitive social conventions in her cultural context which are contiguous with trauma. For Rose, failure to conform is what Jack Halberstam defines as “queer failure”: it is a triumph of personal authenticity over gender essentialism and an acceptance of human imperfection. In the journey towards self-knowledge, Rose’s surviving trauma and defying gender scripts cause the “sticky affects” of shame and humiliation identified by Amelia DeFalco; the feeling that women are not afforded hope; and, in stressful situations, emotional dissociation and emotional economies, as identified by DeFalco and York. Rose’s marriage fails because of a sadomasochistic power struggle. Rose tarries with disconnection from others and from self; however, she innovates gender and subverts the intergenerational cycle of victimvictimizer by achieving a sense of community and strengthening personal authenticity, which Margaret Atwood says is, for “Munro’s women,” “an essential element, like air.”

Sociology of Vibe: Blackness, Felt Criminality, and Emotional Epistemology

The opacity and mundaneness of racism often allows it to slip through our traditional systems of accounting and measuring. The study of racialized emotions has been an important intervention in sociology to understand the intimate nature of racialized social structures. There still is a need to understand the language Black communities use to communicate their complex emotional worlds and the nuanced ways abusive power systems are felt in everyday life. Using 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in northeast North Carolina and data from 23 in-depth interviews, the author examines the relationship between Black people’s emotional habitus and racial structures. The results indicate that Black people developed vibe as a rhetorical tool to articulate their complex emotional economy and it is regularly used to make sense of racialize experiences. Vibe is not limited to racial understanding as it works to name the often unsayable and perceptive ways people know, feel, and respond to the opacity and non-quantifiable dimensions of social experience. This paper focuses on the ways Black community members used vibe to articulate feeling the criminalization of Blackness or what this research refers to as ‘felt criminality.’ Despite facing emotional subjugation Black community members were still invested in emotive projects and used their felt experience as an epistemological resource to make sense of racial processes in a supposedly colorblind society.

Compelled by an Emotional Economy of Care: Explorations of the Youth Justice Student ‘Career’

This article provides insights into a project involving youth justice undergraduates learning a range of social theory to inform reflexive explorations of ‘career’. Such exploration involved scrutinising personal operationalisation of ‘career’ and sociological factors that influence career motivation both retrospectively and anticipatorily. The analysis finds that students feel compelled by an emotional economy of care towards youth justice work; the overcoming of turbulent life events that now requires an emotional return. Such findings provide useful insights for future policy, pedagogy and practice to aid a ‘children first’ approach to critical reflective practice.

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's <i>Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty</i>

The Promise of Affect and the Enduring Economy of Emotions in Caribbeanist Anthropology

The Promise of Affect and the Enduring Economy of Emotions in Caribbeanist Anthropology

A Political Economy of Emotions: The Love and Labour of Filipina Migrant Care Workers in Canada

A Political Economy of Emotions: The Love and Labour of Filipina Migrant Care Workers in Canada

The Israeli elephant in the settler-colonial room

ABSTRACT This article presents a rationale to expand settler-colonial studies so as to conceptually fuse in the same proposition the question of settler-colonial permanence with that of the settler subject. Arguments are elaborated based on one particular case study, Palestine. This gap in the research in relation to Palestine not only has left unresolved the problem of how to explain the continuation of the Israeli settler regime beyond its unequivocal overt and superior mechanisms of legal and brute power but has also kept the concrete perpetrators in the shadows, away from public accountability. The article also lays out a number of potential dimensions to lead research into the conceptual nexus suggested here, for the specific case of Palestine. These dimensions, which I suggest form the emotional economy of Israeli settler-colonial subjectivity, comprise (1) the compensatory distributions of settler-colonial capture, (2) the historical formation of strata of subjectivation, (3) the avenues of socialization that cement the commitment to a militarized society, and (4) the ways by which settler learning and settler practice are conjoined in everyday training.

Virginia Woolf, Immanence and Ontological Pacifism

In these times of pandemics, increasing social inequalities, civic unrest and the rise of illiberalism, populism, anti-European Union politics and the ‘fake news’ ideology, it is important to revisit Woolf’s pacifism and anti-war and anti-fascist activism. Woolf’s writing offers a mode of understanding emotional economies of despair at this moment of the posthuman convergence and reworking these negative passions into the building blocks of a sustainable present and an affirmative future. Approaching Woolf from a feminist neo-vitalist position as a thinker of immanence, sexed matter, and affirmative ethics, she shows us how to embody the cracks or wounds of existence in ways accountable to our times.

Women’s Work, Precarity, and Cultural Labor, or the Affective Economy of the Assistant

Thinking about the dynamics of precarity challenges us to defy and avoid any essentialised and crystallised category of exploitation and of the worker in the contemporary chain of value extraction. Indeed, since the neoliberal paradigm is often described as a regime shattering any distinction between life and work, such a productive dimension involves tackling subjectivity at the intersection of class, race, gender, ability/disability. The aim of this paper is to examine the recent The Assistant (2019) by Kitty Green, which, because of its melancholic and disempowering affective patterns, embodies a fascinating critical potential in reversing mythologies and imaginative traps related to dreams of individualised self-entrepreneurship. The film allows us to discuss these same intertwined levels by observing the emotional economy entailed in cultural work and how much this ecology can be connected with more general coordinates and strategies of feminisation and extraction of care-related activities.

Emotional economy in digital transformations of modern society

The article reveals the issues of emotional economy in the conditions of modern transformation processes taking into account the development of digital economy, emotional management, artificial intelligence. The processes of transformation of modern society are under the influence of the network economy as a catalyst for geoeconomic processes with an emphasis on broad informatization, globalization, and opens up great opportunities for humanity to expand the exchange of goods, services, information, technology and capital, humanitarian cooperation and spiritual enrichment. Such trends are receiving special attention in the context of global processes caused by quarantine measures for David-19. Today, the goal of digital technologies is to meet the needs of the population, which are changing with the development of IT developments, in particular - to create a more comfortable and efficient interaction between the public and the management system.