The grins of others: Figuring ethnic difference in medieval facial expressions

Phillips, Kim M.

doi:10.1057/s41280-016-0039-6

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…In this special issue, we insist that, because emotions may be historicized, there must also be a history of facial expressivity. Re-interpreting recent ethnographic and psychological studies of human facial expression, Kim Phillips argues in her essay in this collection that the expressive face is always subject to cultural construction: 'It stands to reason,' she concludes, that, like emotions, 'facial expressions […] also have a history' (Phillips, 2016). Philippa Maddern, reflecting on Ekman's theories and their pervasive influence, shows that there is still a substantial and unreconciled division between those who see the face as a reliable and unchanging index of timeless and unchanging emotions, and those who see the face as an important register of social, cultural, and ethnic differences in emotional practices.…”

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confidence: 99%

Facing Up to the History of Emotions

Downes

Trigg

2017

Postmedieval

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This special issue of postmedieval brings together several strands of medieval and medievalist work in the history of emotions, with a focus on literary, historical and cinema studies. It asks how we may best 'face up' to work that has been done already in these fields, and speculates about work that might yet be done, especially by medievalists working across medieval and postmedieval sources. In the idiom 'facing up,' we evoke the impulse to assess and realize the place of medieval studies in the burgeoning field of emotions research. We also conjure our conceptual focus -the expressive human faceas a complex and intriguing source for reading emotions in the past. Whether the face is taken as textual or visual, literal or conceptual, represented or embodied, it is, like the emotions, critical in Western understandings of humanity itself.Conceptually, psychologically, and artistically, the face is perceived as being at the forefront of many human interactions and emotional practices. These range from the larger, universalizing claims of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom the face is the 'primordial signifier' that guarantees human relationships with each other and with the divine (Levinas, [1961(Levinas, [ ] 1979, to the dizzying arrays of facial emoticons that compete for our attention on our smart phones when we Ó

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confidence: 99%

Facing Up to the History of Emotions

Downes

Trigg

2017

Postmedieval

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The Many Faces of Smiles

Rychlowska

Manstead

Schalk

2019

The Social Nature of Emotion Expression

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Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

Brazil

2024

Postmedieval

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Passion episodes such as the Buffeting are known for the powerful acts of compassion they occasioned within audiences through their performance of violence on the person of Jesus. Few critics, however, have considered that these episodes depend on antisemitic, Islamophobic, and anti-Black depictions of antagonists when engendering such emotional dispositions. By investigating the dynamics of mockery through a deeper look into the composite identities of Jesus’s antagonists, this study reveals that these plays and the communities that produced them rely on a disingenuous stance of victimhood for their effectiveness. This ‘victim play’—the collaborative community effort to claim the status of victim while simultaneously participating in the victimization of others—obscures that those who are attributed cruel acts of mockery are actually its targets. The powerful rhetorical strategies of the premodern English episodes are thus unearthed in this study.

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The grins of others: Figuring ethnic difference in medieval facial expressions

Cited by 5 publications

References 24 publications

Facing Up to the History of Emotions

Facing Up to the History of Emotions

The Many Faces of Smiles

Playing the Victim: Mockery, compassion, and racialization in premodern English Buffeting plays

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