Emotions and power: reconciling conceptual twins

Emotion and Interest in Marriage and Domestic Power: Some Results of a Research in Portugal

“…The investigation was based on the collection, treatment and analysis on the results of a survey with 800 people, from rural and urban areas, and with diverse age groups, education levels and occupations, and 20 semi-structured interviews and field observation, in the Portuguese context. This research on the combination of emotion, interest and power within the marriage assumes that, beyond the interests inherent to the macro-economic and institutional mechanisms, the domination, subjugation and sexual discrimination namely of the women is reproduced, reinforced or counteracted at various levels: socio-structural, organisational-institutional and interactive [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. At meso and microsociological level.…”

Editorial

“…One of the most important concerns of studies of emotion and affect is their ability to relate between people but also to divide and discriminate against them, and thus to create power relations. Research therefore claims that emotion and affect need to be perceived as important means of power and of governing (Heaney 2011, Pykett et al 2018. Some scientists use a more instrumental approach and analyse how governments deliberately develop affective and emotional policy measures to activate citizens or to exclude those depicted as 'Others' (from full citizenship).…”

In the Name of Love: Marriage Migration, Governmentality, and Technologies of Love

“…Governmentality being about the conduct of conduct, its relationship with emotions would thus appear to be limited to the ways in which discourses and practices influence an appropriate emotional landscape or “habitus” (Gould :32) or “feeling rules” (Hochschild :563) which delineate zones of appropriate feelings and emotions in a given social environment. At best, suggests Heaney, “Foucault's conception of power as networks of force and strategy which constitute the subject could be conceptualized as producing emotional structures within the individual” (:266).…”

“…Affective dimensions are virtually absent from his discussions of sexuality and the creation of the self. Several commentators have long pointed out that Foucault himself tells us nothing about emotions (Poster ; Heaney ) and even less about love. At the individual level, emotions appear ancillary to projects about “care of the self” and the very constitution of the self: emotions are affected by power through the body and the realization of its individuality.…”