In this moving and thoughtful book, Kathleen Woodward explores the
politics and poetics of the emotions, focusing on American culture
since the 1960s. She argues that we are constrained in terms of
gender, race, and age by our culture's scripts for "emotional"
behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is
a symptom of our increasingly media-saturated culture. She also
shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our
experience, revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form
of intelligence.
Referring discreetly to her own experience, Woodward examines
the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity,
considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena, with
feminist anger, racial shame, old-age depression, and sympathy for
non-human cyborgs (including robots) as key cases in point. She
discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures
engender "new" affects that in turn can help us understand our
changing world if we are attentive to them--the "statistical panic"
produced by the risk society, with its numerical portents of
disease and mortality; the rage prompted by impenetrable and
bloated bureaucracies; the brutal shame experienced by those caught
in the crossfire of the media; and the conservative compassion that
is not an emotion at all, only an empty political slogan.
The orbit of "Statistical Panic" is wide, drawing in feminist
theory, critical phenomenology, and recent theories of the
emotions. But at its heart are stories. As an antidote to the
vacuous dramas of media culture, with its mock emotions and
scattershot sensations, Woodward turns to the autobiographical
narrative. Stories of illness--by Joan Didion, Yvonne Rainer, Paul
Monette, and Alice Wexler, among others--receive special attention,
with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a
whole.
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