Bad Feelings, Feeling Badly

Abstract

“Emotions have been constructed as the other of thought, rationality, and reason, and they have also been projected onto the bodies of gendered and racial others,” writes Sara Ahmed in discussing the politics of fear (2003, 381). Ahmed is one node in the lineage of feminist theorists whose work calls for a new attention to emotion as a fundamental dimension of our inner and outer lives, particularly as one that’s shaped by interpersonal and structural injustices. In keeping with this tradition, my dissertation asks what we owe to others’ emotions by considering the emotions as normatively evaluable. Chapter 1 studies the weaponization of emotions through a critical disability studies lens. Chapter 2 presents the nascent affective injustice literature as an attempt to identify wrongdoings that target the emotions, and points to some shortcomings of this literature. In chapter 3, I look at a particular species of emotional wronging that relies on the weaponization not of any particular emotion, but of sociocultural norms governing our interactions with others’ emotions. Chapter 4 explores the prevalence of emotional wronging in online communities. In chapter 5, I propose attentive care – a blend of traditional care ethics with Iris Murdoch’s writings on just attention – as a way of making sense of our obligations toward others in their capacities as feeling beings.