Collection: Emotions and Society Editors’ Choice

 

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Editors' Choice Collection Emotions and Society

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Environmental problems abound and it can be difficult for individuals to know how to act for the best. Moreover, knowing how we should feel about these problems and our potential actions has become increasingly unclear and confusing. Navigating these complexities involves reflecting on one’s own and other people’s emotions. This article explores how individuals put their emotional reflexivity to use in relation to two specific environmental emotions: eco-guilt and eco-shame. We conducted 20 in-depth interviews with Danish citizens about their experiences and emotions connected to being consumers in these times of substantial environmental challenges. A chief part of this emotional reflexivity involved judgements about whether it was good or bad to experience eco-guilt and eco-shame. These judgements were often made with reference to how useful the emotions were in motivating pro-environmental behaviour and whether or not the emotions were authentic. Some respondents expressed a strong sense that they ‘ought to’ experience eco-guilt and eco-shame, while others showed resistance to experiencing these emotions and the perceived social pressure to be more sustainable. Exploring emotional reflexivity around eco-guilt and eco-shame provides insights into the social and moral forces that pull people in different – and at times conflicting – directions regarding their feelings about environmental issues. We discuss our results in light of an emotional regime imposing on individuals the sense that they ought to experience emotions of care for the environment.

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This article investigates gendered differences in emotion work in contemporary Australian society by examining family-oriented emotion work. We examine the ways parents in heterosexual relationships perform emotion work for their children and their partners through qualitative, semi-structured interviews, focusing on changing experiences and shifting structuration processes around gendered norms and emotional inequality. We found some evidence of continuing gender essentialism and hegemonic-masculine behaviours. Female respondents were more likely to perform regular emotion work and adopt empathic attitudes towards their children, as well as manage their own emotions concerning their partners. Many respondents believed that these gender differences were ‘innate and natural’. However, more progressive inclusive-masculine behaviours were evident in men managing their own emotions, seeking more emotional engagement, and performing more caring than authoritative emotion work for their children. It was also evident in men and women both performing numerous forms of care and interpersonal emotion work for each other (that is, their partners). This study points to the emergence of more fluid structuration and ‘softer’ forms of gender social constructionism, in place of the ‘harder’ constructionism and gender essentialism predominant in prior studies.

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This article uses the notion of intimate ethnography to further a discussion on social constructions of family ties, secrets and complex strategies of storytelling. Using the example of a book published about one’s own family history, the author presents several ethical dilemmas where engagement with intimate ethnographies is fraught with pitfalls and can tear apart people, families and individuals; however, it can also give a brief and illuminating holistic experience of mutual horizontal connectedness, human harmony, and communion across time and space. The article argues that the intimacy in this ethnography traces the residues of violence and oppression, but also moments of harmony and happiness to create a holistic, complete, anthropological picture of myself and the world that makes me – with its bright and dark sides.

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Inherited family objects are often precious or cherished, a source of warm emotions connecting us to ancestors across time. But sometimes the family keepsakes we possess, tangible or intangible, can generate more troubling emotions. They may transmit to us things that we were not meant to have or do not want. They might link us to pasts with which we would prefer not to be entangled or feel compelled to set right. In this article, I draw from a sociological study of settler descendants in Australia who are reckoning with the lives of their colonist ancestors via family history research. I focus on several case studies to explore people’s relations to family inheritances that evoke troubling emotions and demonstrate departures from the lives of ancestors as well as connections. This analysis offers us ways to conceptualise the challenging and compelling roles that family inheritances can play in the lives of descendants reckoning with the material legacies of their colonist ancestors, and in the context of wider moves towards inter/national reckoning and reparative justice for colonised peoples and their descendants.

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This article examines the intersecting roles of the face with reference to the popularisation of the smile in Republican China. Research on emotional labour presupposes the potency of the open, beautiful and polite smile without delving into its underlying emotional, aesthetic and sociocultural fabric. The article argues that the modern invincible smile not only conveys emotions, facial ideals and etiquette but, at a deeper level, reproduces expressive, aesthetic and cultural order. Through the qualitative analysis of Republican discourses about the smile and its visual representations in calendar posters, pictorials, portrait photographs and films, the article demonstrates how the broad, tooth-exposing smile was dynamically constructed as a charming, cheerful and civilised face. The popularity of the smiling face in this era reveals a dramatic transformation in China’s emotional regime and expressive convention, one that is interwoven with the rise of consumerism, the spread of hedonism and the wider social process of modernisation. By exploring this complex interplay, the article evinces the multiple social lines that construct and constitute the face.

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The aim is to theorise hope from a sociology of emotion perspective and propose a general framework for the analysis of discrete emotions – the emotive-cognitive chain of evaluation – that can be applied by analysing different types of hope. Hope is defined as the emotion of future possibility, distinct from self-confidence, faith and trust. Hope as a foreground emotion, subject to emotive-cognitive evaluation, arises in a bad present (target) as an outcome of past failed hopes. The object of hope is future improvement. Given limited agency in fundamentally uncertain circumstances, an external source of hope is located. Background import informs the assessment of the present as bad, what improvement to hope for (object) and the identification of sources. I argue that fear is a companion emotion of hope, and that a reasonable balance between hope and fear can make hope more in tune with real circumstances. Elaborating on the action continuum of hope, I propose that hope is never truly passive and that action itself generates hope. As a collective emotion, hope becomes collectively evaluated and mutually supported in a responsive social context. Responsive hope may, however, also be delusional. Different hope constructs are illustrated, drawing on findings in a project on the post-apocalyptic environmental movement. Theorising hope in the context of the climate crisis highlights the specific quality of hope as an emotion of future possibility and the significance of hope for present action and future object outcomes, its potential for social change and how we collectively create the future.

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