The Cultural Politics of Emotion

by Sara Ahmed

A bold exploration of the relationship between emotions and politics, through case studies on international terrorism, asylum, migration, reconciliation and reparation. Develops a theory of how emotions work and their effects on our daily lives.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Feminism, Theory, Politics, Psychology, Sociology

264 pages, Paperback

First published July 16, 2004

About the author

Sara Ahmed is an independent queer feminist scholar of colour. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. Her most recent book is No is Not a Lonely Utterance: The Art and Activism of Complaining which came out with Allen Lane in September 2025, and which is a companion text to The Feminist Killjoy Handbook which was published by Allen Lane in 2023. Previous books include Complaint! (2021), What's The Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010) and Queer Phenomenology: Orientations Objects, Others all published by Duke University Press. She blogs at feministkilljoys.com and has a newsletter https://feministkilljoys.substack.com/.

Reviews

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

bruh

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

there was a point in the middle where it felt like she was just listing different emotions and jotting down some thoughts on them and it wasn't clear how it all fit together. and I'm not totally sold on her semiotic angle on emotions. but the opening chapter on pain and the final chapters on queerness and feminism were great and worked very well together. I was especially moved by the discussion in "feminist attachments" on wonder and hope as affective states that open us up to social change. like, I was stuttering with joy when I tried to explain it to people. it works better as part of the book but if you don't have time to read the whole thing, I'd highly recommend that chapter to anyone involved in feminist organising.

[TJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has totally altered how I think about emotions and the relationships between emotions, bodies, surfaces and space. I couldn't possibly give it an adequate review, I think, but here are some scattered & incomplete thoughts and impressions, that I may add to for my own use as I have time to.

Ahmed seems sometimes to work from a pretty negative epistemological point -- I don't think this is a bad thing, to be clear, and I'm thinking mostly of her writing on pain, and how pain shapes our sense of body and self (and, sort of conversely, how comfort is characterized as a loss of awareness of the body and its surfaces: "One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view... in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies.") Ahmed wants to dissuade her reader from this sort of negative reading ("it is not that pain causes the forming of the surface. Such a reading would ontologise pain [and indeed sensation more broadly] as that which 'drives' being itself"), but through the work it becomes difficult to shake the negative, as pain begins to feel intimately linked to the body, and comfort only available to the body that forgets its materiality.
It is interesting too to compare this pain that allows the body to become conscious of itself to Elaine Scarry's pain in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of The World, which obliterates ("unmakes") the body and its world. Maybe the difference is in the degree of pain. Ahmed uses the stubbing of a toe as an example of that which allows the body to become conscious of its surface, while Scarry is concerned with how torture "unmakes" the subject's world.
But I don't want to make Ahmed out to be some kind of nihilist; she is very much not. One of my favorite sections of the book is "Feminism and Wonder," in which Ahmed describes her feminism as "creative" and full of "joy and care," and goes on to show how wonder (as in, the wonder of seeing the world "'as if' for the first time" through a new feminist lens) exposes the historicity of the world. "Wonder is about learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, as and something that came to be, over time, and with work."

Her work on "stickiness" has to (has to!) be the most impressive of it all. She shows how stickiness is linked with disgust, in which stickiness is that which threatens to stick to us. And how a "sticky sign" is that which accumulates affective value at the same time as it blocks the sign/word from acquiring new (or different) affective value. She discusses most how disgust "sticks," through the circulation of certain signs, to bodies of color (in her analysis she discusses mostly how disgust sticks to bodies that can be read as "terrorist" in the post-9/11 U.S. or UK). I feel that a discussion of the way that disgust sticks to trans bodies (mostly trans womens' bodies) would enhance her analysis, as the display of disgust towards trans womens' bodies is so often made so visceral (think The Crying Game, in which IRA fighter Fergus literally vomits upon realizing that his love object is a trans woman). (but Ahmed isn't much of a pop culture analyst anyway)

[Maria]

In addition to many useful concepts such as "affective economies" or the "stickiness" of emotions, here are some parts of the book that particularly affected me:

"the West gives to others only insofar as it is forgotten what the West has already taken in its very capacity to give in the first place." (22)

"Pain is evoked as that which even our most intimate others cannot feel. The impossibility of ‘fellow feeling’ is itself the confirmation of injury. The call of such pain, as a pain that cannot be shared through empathy, is a call not just for an attentive hearing, but for a different kind of inhabitance. It is a call for action, and a demand for collective politics, as a politics based not on the possibility that we might be reconciled, but on learning to live with the impossibility of reconciliation, or learning that we live with and beside each other, and yet we are not as one." (39)

"If we feel shame, we feel shame because we have failed to approximate ‘an ideal’ that has been given to us through the practices of love. What is exposed in shame is the failure of love, as a failure that in turn exposes or shows our love." (106)

"National love places its hope in the next generation; the postponement of the ideal sustains the fantasy that return is possible. If the failure of return extends one’s investment, then national love also requires an ‘explanation’ for this failure; otherwise, hope would convert into despair or ‘giving up’ on the loved object." (131)

"in the resistance to speaking in the name of love, in the recognition that we do not simply act out of love, and in the understanding that love comes with conditions however unconditional it might feel, we can find perhaps a different kind of line or connection between the others we care for, and the world to which we want to give shape. Perhaps love might come to matter as a way of describing the very affect of solidarity with others in the work that is done to create a different world." (141)

"Although the other may not be alive to create new impressions, the impressions move as I move: the new slant provided by a conversation, when I hear something I did not know; the flickering of an image through the passage of time, as an image that is both your image, and my image of you. To grieve for others is to keep their impressions alive in the midst of their death." (160)

"The hope of queer politics is that bringing us closer to others, from whom we have been barred, might also bring us to different ways of living with others. Such possibilities are not about being free from norms, or being outside the circuits of exchange within global capitalism. It is the nontranscendence of queer that allows queer to do its work." (165)

"we need to contest this understanding of emotion as ‘the unthought’, just as we need to contest the assumption that ‘rational thought’ is unemotional, or that it does not involve being moved by others." (170)

"To express hope for another kind of world, one that is unimaginable at present, is a political action, and it remains so even in the face of exhaustion and despair." (186)

This entire last paragraph of the concluding chapter:

"Emotions tell us a lot about time; emotions are the very ‘flesh’ of time. They show us the time it takes to move, or to move on, is a time that exceeds the time of an individual life. Through emotions, the past persists on the surface of bodies. Emotions show us how histories stay alive, even when they are not consciously remembered; how histories of colonialism, slavery, and violence shape lives and worlds in the present. The time of emotion is not always about the past, and how it sticks. Emotions also open up futures, in the ways they involve different orientations to others. It takes time to know what we can do with emotion. Of course, we are not just talking about emotions when we talk about emotions. The objects of emotions slide and stick and they join the intimate histories of bodies, with the public domain of justice and injustice. Justice is not simply a feeling. And feelings are not always just. But justice involves feelings, which move us across the surfaces of the world, creating ripples in the intimate contours of our lives. Where we go, with these feelings, remains an open question." (202)

[Andrew]

Hoo boy. I was hoping for a studied analysis of emotion from a roughly continental-philosophy perspective, and the big-ups from Abigail “Philosophy Tube” Thorn were a positive sign as well. But what I got was... just the worst... kind of prose that emerged after critical theory had done its big and important tearings-down, and reflects the linguistic styles of a Foucault or a Judith Butler without any of the important ideas. Sign and metaphor are the sites of the discussion, at the expense of material reality. Sara Ahmed might (total speculation) claim that my clean distinction of the material and the immaterial is privileging a certain discourse or in some way colonial, but it's hard to say, because it's honestly hard to suss out what she believes. She's Australian, and so I'll make this strained metaphor – reading Ahmed's prose is a little like watching the water go down a Southern Hemisphere drain and straining your eyes to see if the Coriolis Effect is making it go the other way (something I may have once done in a Balinese hotel room). It is a meaningless activity. And this is a meaningless book. I have some serious reservations about Martha Nussbaum as an intellectual, but her particular philosophical text about emotion is infinitely subtler and clearer.

[Pedro Pirata]

Es fascinante la propuesta de Ahmed, según la cual las emociones no se pueden situar como propiedades intrínsecas del sujeto, ni tampoco como efectos de las propiedades de los objetos. No busca, sin embargo, definir lo que son las emociones, sino mostrar cómo funcionan:formando a los cuerpos de determinada manera y en determinado momento, uniendo y separando superficies. Las emociones estarían circunscritas a una economía política de ciertos objetos, cuerpos y signos que fluyen socialmente conformando grupos y cuerpos. Construyendo un conocimiento situado a partir de diversos documentos (entradas de blogs, discursos históricos...), Ahmed analiza el funcionamiento de emociones como el miedo, la repugnancia o la vergüenza de manera totalmente original y lúcida.
Me gustaría escribir una reseña más elaborada y detallada, pero necesitaría una segunda (y tercera y cuarta) lectura en profundidad, pues es un texto extraordinariamente denso (escrito en un estilo, además, demasiado académico y farragoso) pero tan rico en apreciaciones teóricas y propuestas políticas.
Maravilloso.

[Sabrarf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfectly happy with this book! I used to read Sara Ahmed's article a lot but I always want it to read this book because of one article I read before from it and of course the catching title of it.
In this book Sara explores the way in which emotions affects our bodies and the connection between emotions and politics. I personally really like 3 chapters more than others. her analysis of shame, the queer feeling and the Feminist attachments. By reading this book I could analyze my own emotions in my work and their relations to my body and how I embody them every day.

[miriam · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Iris Mirsalari · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There can be nothing more dangerous to a body than the social agreement that that body is dangerous."

[Frank Cernik · Rating 5 out of 5]

The premise of this book is that the distinction between sensations and emotions is necessarily analytic and therefore a requirement rather than a finding. Emotions are better described, rather, as impressions, the effects of surfaces on each other. As impressions, encounters involve the co-constitution of emotions and objects: emotions are about objects and shape them, and are also shaped by encounters with objects. Emotions are produced through a certain in-betweenness, where they reach from the encounter to each of the entities of that encounter, but are then assigned by each entity to another entity: In my encounter with a bear, I became afraid, and so the bear was fearsome. Even so, Ahmed says that emotions create the very effect of impressions that allow for the differentiation between ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ and thereby help to constitute both the ‘individual’/‘psychic’ and ‘society’/‘social.’ She acknowledges that feelings are rarely held ‘in common,’ and so suggests that the objects of emotion are what circulate, rather than the emotions themselves. The circulation of these objects, in turn, allows subjects to become invested in structures, including the structures that are the causes of subordination.
Emotions are about doing things in particular ways, as well as about both alignment and differentiation. Sadness aligns a subject with an other’s pain, but also maintains the distinction between the subject and the other. Pain and discomfort, themselves, create (an awareness of) the limits of the body and are oriented toward creating space between the subject and the cause of the pain. Hate often involves a sort of imbalance, wherein it does not have a clear referent, but rather depends on a failure to identify a clear and distinct other in order to do its work, creating instead a nebulous and slippery ‘they’ whose presence is constantly demanded (and created through hate’s acts and speech acts). Within fear, she hews closely to Heidegger’s outline, but adds that fear constricts bodily space and restricts mobility in social space. Disgust, which is about stickiness and blockages, also undermines the distinctions that it creates: what is felt to be disgusting also retains a kind of attraction for the disgusted. The same is true of shame; while it is true that shame is kind of like self-directed disgust that intensifies the skin, it also relies on the presence and attractiveness of others, in front of whom one can be ashamed. Finally for the emotions, love involves the alignment and identification with a constructed ideal, which ideality then returns to the subject. In her chapter on “Queer Feelings,” Ahmed argues that bodies take the form of repetitive norms, and highlights the roles of emotions in creating and maintaining those norms, as well as how they may provide a means of resisting those norms. Closing out her argument in “Feminist Attachments,” she interprets the role of anger in the cultural dismissal of feminism, and, without discounting the worth of that anger, argues that wonder may be a better public face for the movement, as it exemplifies the fundamental contingency of social institutions and reality.

[Tara Brabazon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning and thoughtful book. Ahmed writes beautifully and her even and textured prose allows some powerful arguments to emerge. I was originally concerned that the argument would be too strongly textualized. Close textual readings would betray more complex theorizing. But instead, powerful arguments are configured about normativity and normative bodies. The role of shame and the 'fetish' of comfort remain percussive forces in global capitalism.

A moving, evocative and provocative book.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

sara tía tenías que decir todos estos facts de manera tan rebuscada???

“even though love is a demand for reciprocity, it is also an emotion that lives with the failure of that demand often through an intensification of its affect” (130)

[Victoria Hawco · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot. And one day, I’ll even go back and read the parts I skimmed.

[Liv · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as uni books go it was decent, read it at the speed of light though so might not have processed it fully

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this books because emotions figure strongly in my qualitative data. Initially, I so wanted to disregard the finding. I felt I had to come uncomfortably close to my interview partners, especially that I had to be critical of their emotions. This joins my naive and former understanding of emotions as having a sacred status that intellectual analysis can defile. According to Berger (1981), this is the “Romantic assumption (‘to dissect is to kill,’ said Wordsworth) that the value of an esthetic (or emotional) experience is in the mystery of its immediate impact, and that it therefore needs to be protected against analytic understanding” (236). Simultaneously, I hadn’t the ghost of a notion what the literature on emotions say. Then I started looking for an intro and had the good fortune to run into this wonderful book. First, the writing is quite different from all the sociological stuff I read. But after some patience I eventually warmed to it. If I have to say something about the writing style, I'd say that the words subjects and objects are ubiquitous in the book and at times are dizzying and confusing. That's because Ahmed gets a lot of ideas and inspiration from the likes of Freud and Christieva and psychoanalysis in general. On the other hand, I felt quite at home whenever she cited psychologists or sociologists. But to give her credit, her book deals with a very sophisticated matter and the fact that she keeps it simple to the likes of me is quite an achievement.

The book starts with saying that emotions are cultural and social. Ahmed gives an impressive tour d'horizon before asserting that. Psychologists, sociologists, and critical theory and cultural studies folks will find in this tour a lot of interesting ideas on love, hate, shame, pain, among others.

The book then tackles the main point: The affective economies of emotions. This is not a theory rather than a new perspective. Ahmed explains that emotions work through language. Words circulate through repetition, sticking, resticking, and sliding through metonymy and resistance to literalisation. This circulation is discursive and done in relation to bodies. For instance, circulation serves the function of getting bodies together by labelling and excluding others (e.g., we the pure folks of this country against the refugees dirtying our purity; our hatred is just a way to love our country), and excluding others to get (our) bodies together. This circulation is not always exact, hence the importance of the sliding of sings and meanings. Ahmed's at length in the topic:

“Importantly, the word ‘terrorist’ sticks to some bodies as it reopens histories of naming, just as the word ‘terrorist’ slides into other words in the accounts of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (such as fundamentalism, Islam, Arab, repressive, primitive and so on). Indeed, the slide of metonymy can function as an implicit argument about the causal relations between terms (such as Islam and terrorism), but in such a way that it does not require an explicit statement. The work done by metonymy means that it can remake links – it can stick words like ‘terrorist’ and ‘Islam’ together – even when arguments are made that seem to unmake those links. Utterances like ‘this is not a war against Islam’ coexist with descriptions such as ‘Islamic terrorists’, which work to restick the words together and constitute their coincidence as more than simply temporal. The sliding between signs also involves ‘sticking’ signs to bodies: the bodies who ‘could be terrorists’ are the ones who might ‘look Muslim’. Such associations stick precisely insofar as they resist literalisation.”

Circulation, as far as it sticks, it is essential to all kinds of group-related emotions, and these define a lot of our existence. Commenting on existence, she writes, for instance, that "histories... remain alive insofar as they have already left their impressions" on the body. The body, on the other hand, is a vehicle for emotions and is not what it is without them. (Remember, Ahmed is not for a biological or psychological perspective on emotions).

I find her talk on the skin as the point of contact with the world and our understanding of it fascinating. History, in Ahmed's terms, is what is under the skin.

This is a meagre comment on a great book. I'm also in a hurry I don't know why. (Perhaps because I already talked about it enough in my thesis?) But I recommend the book. Give it patience if you find the language unaccessible. One cannot always afford reading in their niche only.

Refs:
Berger, B. M. (1981). The Survival of a Counterculture. University of California Press.

[Maya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fuck

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

A semiotic analysis on the politics of emotion, exemplified through current case studies. Sara Ahmed does this mostly by studying the articulation and expression of emotions of love and hate in contemporary issues such as the response of Americans to September 11 attacks, the demand of Australians to be ashamed of their history of violence towards Aboriginals, and or how hate organisations such as white supremacist groups justify themselves through a rhetoric of 'love'.

I found so much of her writing to be illuminating and full of the 'wonder' that she describes in the 2nd last chapter; a wonder of realising that this is how the world works, and then asking, why does it work like that? One of my favourite chapters was "The Affective Politics of Fear" where she explains the politics of fear especially when selectively applied to certain bodies (brown, Muslim, South Asian, etc). In order to feel fear against such bodies, those bodies must have first already been coded as 'violent' or 'hateful'; as a body that one would feel fearful of. There is a discussion then of 'stickiness' how certain bodies accumulate signs, how certain negative values 'stick' to such bodies, a semiotic reading of racial prejudice.

I also found interesting how she explains that hate and love are basically impressions that are placed onto bodies, repeatedly, and that's what fear or love is -- how impressions are impressed on bodies -- to be turned against out of fear, to move towards someone who is 'safer', these are all acts of 'impressions'. In this way every act carries emotion, and every gesture communicates something, carries affect. It communicates which bodies are more agreeable & which are not, it communicates which bodies can be given more space and which bodies are given the injunction to shrink. The way these emotions are manipulated for affect thus can result in the justification of things like increased state power, justification for wars, or to 'cover-up' and conceal pain or guilt or shame.

Also great were the chapters "Queer Feelings" and the hopeful "Feminist Attachments" which really explicated the operations of power that through repetition of acts give the impression of what is considered 'natural' and therefore 'unnatural', and how one thus respond as a person who has been considered 'abject' / non-heteronormative. I feel like she has provided the most insightful discussion on the debate of marriage & whether it is good politics to want to be a part of that 'system' /heteronormative order.

[Alf Bojórquez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un poco cansado leerlo de corrido porque, como libro académico, busca cierta exhaustividad y eso a los lectores ajenos a la academia puede aburrirnos. Creo que lo importante está en los primeros dos capítulos, el análisis (del 11 de septiembre de 2001 o problemas nacionales de Inglaterra) que hace a partir de los conceptos que genera son mucho menos interesantes que sus definiciones de la economía afectiva y cada una de las emociones descritas. Ahmed es una gran lectora del marxismo y el psicoanálisis sin caer en una escritura incomprensible. Para mí ella es heredera de la tradición más fina del freudomarxismo: Reich, Marcuse, Deleuze pero mejorado y actualizado por el feminismo. Escribe claro y sencillo temas que son muy complejos, este libro es un parteaguas de lo que llaman el giro afectivo.

[Rosalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In my model of sociality of emotions, I suggest that emotions create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that allow us to distinguish between an inside and an outside in the first place. So emotions are not simply something 'I' or 'we' have. Rather, it is through emotions, or how we respond to objects and others, that surfaces and boundaries are made: the 'I' and the 'we' are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others...the surfaces of bodies 'surface' as an effect of the impressions left by others."

Sometimes this all makes perfect sense to me, and other times, I'm like, "What is she talking about???"

[thalia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bit dense and very academic but so important and as relevant today as when written 14 years ago (sadly enough...). Only real criticism it’s reliance on psychoanalytic philosophy, Freud, and some continental philosophy. Her use of those works did not detract from the arguments she was making, but (as she wrote in her afterwards) other thinkers might have been better for advancing the ideas. Nonetheless a crucial text for queer theory, social advocacy, and anyone working in mental / behavioral health

[Alexander · Rating 1 out of 5]

what a load of old croft. stopped reading at ~20%. probably a 2 but seeing it with a 4.34 makes me angry, booooo

[Aditi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don’t know how I feel about this book! At times I felt totally lost by Ahmed’s analysis, and I really wasn’t particularly keen on some of the chapters (especially the one about disgust, which I was skeptical about from start to finish). But some of her analysis was breathtaking. I especially enjoyed the chapter discussing fear and anxiety.

I feel like this is a book I’ll have to come back to a few years down the line to reread and rethink!

[candeagain · Rating 5 out of 5]

increible

[Ingrid · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.75?
de fapt am citit doar 60% but it was enough for me

[Inés · Rating 5 out of 5]

a necessary read for everybody

[Fran Herondale · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,7*
poate cea mai dificila carte pe care am citit o pana acum

[Caleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I finally reconciled myself to the fact that I don’t love this book. In fact, the analysis in some chapters feels forced and a bit dated, bypassing what I consider some really interesting question about living emotion in favor of arguments (sometimes uneven) about how emotions circulate in discourse. (Of course, if the arguments feel dated, it is in part because Sara Ahmed herself has made these important views into part of the wider critical theory discourse.) And yes, the weakness of this book is that it is too focused on what is done in the name of different emotions rather than how the emotions themselves (and their objects) circulate.

That being said, the last two chapters bring things in the direction of Ahmed’s really perceptive and insightful later work. (I love Queer Phenomenology, and there is movement in that direction here.) And the Afterword of the second edition (written ten years later) is essential reading for locating this book within the discourses of affect theory, studies of emotion, and politics.

Ahmed’s great insights, which later receive more rigorous development, are present here: the historicity of feelings, the role of orientation as constitutive of experience, and the contingency of such orientations on histories that predate the encounter in the present. Moments of contact (proximity, surfaces of touch) and the moments of interpretation that enable the feelings to be intensified and circulated. Emotions are investments, with a history and a social future. This is a really interesting insight, even if it is asserted rather than argued for at places in this early book.

[Çağlar Sayar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Duygular bize zaman hakkinda cok sey anlatir ; duygular zamanin ''etidir''. Hareket etmemiz ya da yolumuza devam etmemiz icin ne kadar zaman gerektigini bize anlatirlar ki , bu bazen kisinin yasam suresinden bile uzun olabilir . Gecmis , duygular vasitasiyla beden yuzeylerinde devamlilik gosterir . Bilincli bir sekilde hatirlanmasalar bile duygular tarihin nasil ayakta kaldigini anlatirlar ; somurgecilik , kolelik , irkcilik ve siddet tarihlerinin yasamlari ve dunyalari nasil sekillendirdigini anlatirlar. Duygunun zamani her zaman gecmisle ve gecmisin nasil yapistigiyla alakali degildir . Duygular , otekilere karsi farkli yonelimler icermeleri yoluyla gelecege de acilir . Elbette , duygular hakkinda konustugumuzda sadece duygulardan bahsetmeyiz . Duygu nesneleri arasinda gecis yapar , yapisir , adalet ve adaletsizligin kamusal alaniyla bedenlerin yakin gecmislerine katilirlar . Adalet sadece bir duygu degildir. Duygular da her zaman adil degildir . Fakat adalet bizi dunya yuzeyleri boyunca hareket ettiren , yasamlarimizin sinirlari icinde dalgalanmalar yaratan duygular icerir . Bu duygularla nereye gittigimizin sorusu ise cevapsiz kalmaya devam eder. Sayfa : 253

[Ingeborg · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are some really interesting thoughts on inequality and the way we see the world, on love and hate and the way it is presented by the messages all around us, about the way stereotypes are perpetuated on and on, in texts as well as life.... But this book is waaaay tooo long, it should have been a 15-20 page article and this would have had a much bigger impact on the reader. There is really no need for all this repetition of the same thoughts over and over again ... And many sentences are waaay too complicated, with a horrible and awkward syntax, completely unnecessary.

This is just one example of the text that did not come to be in the process of thinking, but was somehow artifically made, one of the now so popular but useless and hard to read academic books that were probably needed for author's promotion or something similar....

Too bad, an article about the subject would have had many happy readers, I would have been one of them. This was a torture.

[Teghan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thought-provoking exploration of the role that emotions play in our lives and in the construction of our understanding of the world. Ahmed is a wonderful writer, her work sitting comfortably in the tradition of theoretical writing, but she also manages to make her work more accessible than the canon traditionally is. There are some great chapters and points within this book that really make you think, and some chapters need a bit more fleshing out.

Overall, an worthwhile and important text for scholars of gender, history, and political science.