Decolonizing the Study of Emotions in Politics

Though long-lasting legacies that have rendered the study of emotions in politics a minor space have been successfully contested, it does not mean that the study of emotions in politics have not reproduced important divides that have permeated the general study of emotions in politics. On the contrary, the polarization observed in politics and the power structures that shape knowledge production have created hierarchies that determine which emotions are legitimate as sources of political agency and which reactions are considered dysfunctional emotional responses. Furthermore, these hierarchies dictate whose emotional needs matter and should continuously be protected and whose emotional needs do not matter in the public discourse, specialized scholarship, and political agenda setting. Discourses and knowledge production that undermine the role of structures of oppression, harm and grievance in the emotional responses of individuals facing everyday aggression, discrimination, and harm due to social positionings posed by race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity are intertwined with gendered and racialized dynamics of invisibility and silencing as well as colonial epistemologies that take the white and male experiences as the norm, rendering other experiences as deviant and dysfunctional. These labels have been so powerful in creating a regime of truth in the current scholarship of emotions in politics, delimitating what can be said and what cannot be said, that few pieces have sought to deconstruct the stigmatizing subject positions they create. Most importantly they have fueled right-wing populist discourses that reproduce old neoliberal notions of meritocracy, rationality, and toughness. In this paper, I analyze patterns of invisibility, silencing and the creation of hierarchies that tend to turn the emotional needs for protection of the ‘Other’ into cries of victimhood.