Arina Pismenny

This paper examines the role of emotion norms in constructing both emotions and social identities. Emotions are not biologically fixed or purely individual states; they are shaped by social expectations about what one should feel, how one should express what one feels, and whose emotions count. These emotion norms do not merely constrain expression—they shape which emotions are intelligible, permissible, and punished, thereby contributing to the formation and maintenance of social categories such as gender, race, sexuality, and disability.I argue that emotion norms are key mechanisms through which social identities are constructed, regulated, and enforced. They naturalise dominant gender roles by prescribing distinct emotional repertoires and by penalising deviation. These norms also produce emotional double binds, particularly for marginalised individuals, by making all available emotional responses subject to sanction or misrecognition. However, emotion norms are not monolithic. In certain social contexts, alternative emotional repertoires emerge—ones that refuse the constraints of dominant expectations and make space for previously illegible emotions and identities.Understanding the mutual construction of emotion and identity clarifies how power operates through emotions no less than through institutions and discourse. A feminist philosophy of emotion must take seriously the political stakes of affective life, not only by exposing the workings of emotional injustice, but also by affirming the possibility of constructing new emotional norms that support freedom, recognition, and collective transformation.

In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to distinguish these and also to subsume them under a single concept. Our aims are both theoretical and practical: to provide a unified account of emotional injustice, while recognizing the diversity of this phenomenon; to facilitate further research on this topic; to recognize the political importance of emotions; and to outline some of the ways in which emotional injustice can be combated.