Ask a Feminist: Soraya Chemaly Discusses Feminist Rage with Carla Kaplan and Durba Mitra

Digital Feminism beyond Nativism and Empire: Affective Territories of Recognition and Competing Claims to Suffering in Iranian Women’s Campaigns

“…A u t u m n2 0 2 1 y of injustice that sparks affiliation with a campaign (Chemaly, Kaplan, and Mitra 2019). Prominent among the affects mediated in textual and visual form in campaigns against the compulsory hijab are joy, defiance, hope, fear, even love, as I will illustrate.…”

“…In order to situate my approach to emotion in this inquiry, I draw on feminist and decolonial scholarship on the unequal history and allocation of feelings. I focus, first, on anger as the emotion primarily associated with injustice in feminist scholarship and activism (Chemaly, Kaplan, and Mitra 2019;Kay 2019). The primacy of emotions has historically been associated with gendered and raced inferiority, while white male bodies are those most often designated as in possession of reason (Jaggar 1989;Ahmed 2014, 170).…”

Breaking the plaster: Making do with the fragility of the body

“…They'll think I am hysterical, I thought. Trauma literature discusses how women are seen as overrating their trauma and becoming hysterical about it and thus not taken seriously by doctors and their broader environment (Osborne-Crowley, 2019), while studies also establish how negative emotions, like anger, when expressed by women, come across as unwelcome, unacceptable and as barriers to smooth communication (Ahmed, 2010;Chemaly, 2018). In a gendered society, women are taught to confuse their anger with sadness, rarely learning to recognize, name or express it; anger becomes a 'prohibited emotion'.…”

“…I replied very frankly saying that I know this, but that I did not have this right now and I couldn't just 'put on a pretty face'. Who cares about our intelligence and true emotions in cultures that consistently overshadow our intellectual competencies and emotional states behind happy appearances (Ahmed, 2010;Chemaly, 2018). As women, we mainly learn to be submissive and happy, 'beautiful' but not 'smart'.…”

Escaping the Corset: Rage as a Force of Resistance and Creation in the Korean Feminist Movement

“…All parts of the female body, even the genital areas, are objects of aestheticization. Instead of the corset being the second skin of the female body, Korean women who are indignant against this male supremacy commit to live and resist as if “rage became a layer of my skin” (Chemaly 2018, 282).…”