Emotions and Feminist Theories

Abstract

This article provides an overview of feminist theory in relation to emotion. First, feminist and normative approaches to the emotions are contrasted. Feminist approaches are distin- guished by their attention to the material, institutional and cultural capillaries of power through which discourses of emotion operate. Normative approaches restrict their questions to the limited power that emotion has to shape individual behaviour. The main strands of femi- nist engagement with the emotions are discussed in the following sections of the article. Six types are distinguished: feminist rereadings of developmental emotion dynamics, emotion as authentic femininity, emotion as epistemic resource, emotion as cultural discourses on power, emotion as social labor, and emotion as life on the social margins. The article ends with a discussion of the place of feminist approaches to emotion in the broader context of late 20th- century knowledge production about emotions.