Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (review)

Growing out of the October 2008 conference on “Political Emotions: Affect and the Public Space,” held at the University of Texas, the essays collected in Political Emotions all argue that emotion is a vital component of politics, the arts, and the media, as it is a vital component of rhetoric. Specifically, as the editors explain, members of the “Public Feelings” research group worked to continually challenge the historically gendered division between public and private spheres that has associated emotion with the personal. If, as Lauren Berlant argued in her remarks at the 2003 Public Feelings Seminar, “the public sphere is not rational; it is rhetorical” (1), then emotion is also rhetorical, and it cannot possibly be contained within the personal and must be examined in all areas of public and civic life. Understandably, then, this collection takes on a multidisciplinary perspective. The editors themselves hail from film and media studies, English literature, and art history, although all three connect through their work in women’s and gender studies. Additionally, most of the essays call upon Katie Stewart’s idea of “ordinary affects,” a concept that goes beyond conceptualizing emotion as being connected to either “realism” or “melodrama.” Instead, it points to common, everyday expressions or depictions of emotion to represent historical moments, cultural inequalities, and political contact zones. Thus, the essayists explore film, television, poetry, art, and even eBay, pushing both theoretical and media boundaries.

The collection begins with Deborah Gould’s “On Affect and Protest,” in which she builds upon Berlant’s differentiation between the “irrational” and “nonrational” to counter the historical method of using emotion to dismiss political protest. Using nineteenth century French social psychologist and sociologist Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd to argue against, Gould rejects the alignment of the collective emotion of protest with the irrational or deviant. Instead, Gould places this important aspect of protest with the nonrational and affective, meaning bodily and nonlinguistic, and she rejects the notion that it needs to be attached or defined against cognition. Gould explores the example of AIDs activism in the 1990s to challenge scholars to turn to the idea of affect to analyze social action and inaction to deepen the ways emotional or affective states are interpreted.

In the collection’s most surprising essay, “Babies Who Touch You: Reborn Dolls, Artists, and the Emotive Display of Bodies on eBay,” Michele White expands the notion of text through her rhetorical analysis of reborn dolls (dolls that look like live babies), the artists who create them, and viewers who learn about them. White explores the affect of mothering, art, and commercialism that are communicated through the existence and selling of these dolls. Applying Louis Althusser’s concept of “hailing” to the reborn dolls—and drawing as well on Judith Butler’s discussion of the concept—White argues that consumers of dolls are hailed into intense mothering through the rhetoric of intense mothering on the dolls’ eBay listings. In addition, White uses Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on the connection between touch and emotion to discuss the ways language, images, and depictions of touch on the listings lure consumers in through emotion. The consumers, artists, and viewers of these media texts reveal problematic values and reactions to cultural values of motherhood. As Janet Staiger recalls in the book’s introduction, “The visible and physical repulsion by some conference participants to images of the “reborn child” dolls is one of the strongest memories that I have of the conference” (4).

Other essays explore moments that complicate the split between public and private emotions. Liza Johnson’s “In the Air,” a short piece accompanied by still images of the documentary with the same title, illustrates a different way of depicting the poverty of Scioto County, Ohio, through filming the activities of a circus school in the middle of town. Johnson hoped “to offer an alternative or a corrective to the otherwise oppressive phenomenology of the town” (153) by carving out...