Constructing Feelings, Constructing Selves: Emotion Norms and Social Identities
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59123/cpp3n691Keywords:
social construction, emotion, emotion norms, gender, social identityAbstract
This paper examines the role of emotion norms in constructing both emotions and social identities. Emotions are not biologically fixed or purely individual states; they are shaped by social expectations about what one should feel, how one should express it, and whose emotions count. These emotion norms do not merely constrain expression—they shape which emotions are intelligible, permissible, and punished, thereby contributing to the formation and maintenance of social categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and disability.
I argue that emotion norms are key mechanisms through which social identities are constructed, regulated, and enforced. They naturalize dominant gender roles by prescribing distinct emotional repertoires and by penalizing deviation. These norms also produce emotional double binds, particularly for marginalized individuals, by making all available emotional responses subject to sanction or misrecognition. However, emotion norms are not monolithic. In certain social contexts alternative emotional repertoires emerge—ones that refuse the constraints of dominant expectations and make space for previously illegible emotions and identities.
Understanding the mutual construction of emotion and identity clarifies how power operates not only through institutions and discourse, but also through emotions. A feminist philosophy of emotion must take seriously the political stakes of affective life, not only by exposing the workings of emotional injustice, but also by affirming the possibility of constructing new emotional norms that support freedom, recognition, and collective transformation.
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