Emotional Contingency & Ideological Curation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59123/vezmev24Keywords:
Emotion, ideology, ideology critique, psychological oppression, injustice, resistanceAbstract
Our daily lives make evident that ideologies of all kinds can impact our emotions. Consider, for example, the self-directed shame a working class person might feel when paid too little to make ends meet, the intense anxiety a person of color might feel when entering a majority white space, or the discomfiting pride a woman might feel when she senses a male gaze ogle her body. In each example, classism, racism, and sexism seem intimately connected with how these emotions are generated. What can we say about the role ideology might play in these cases?
In this paper, I offer an explanation of how ideology generates such emotions by proposing a process I term ideological curation. Ideological curation centrally locates the intervention point of ideology at moments of contingency within our emotional lives, where our emotions are generated or become something different than what they were. Ideological curation occurs within such spaces to subtly guide our emotions towards ideological meanings by:
- Significantly impacting the set of emotions available to us; or,
- Significantly exerting pressure towards which emotions we feel.
An analysis of ideological curation, I suggest, provides explanatory benefits that reach beyond the current literature on the interface between ideology and emotion, contributes to growing literatures on emotional injustice, psychological oppression, and finally, can aid in our individual journeys of psychological resistance.
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