Gen Eickers

Recent work on emotional injustice has highlighted the ways in which emotions are regulated, devalued or imposed, especially for members of marginalized groups. However, the relations among emotional injustice, emotional harm and emotional oppression remain undertheorized. We offer a conceptual framework that disentangles these notions and clarifies what makes emotional injustice unjust rather than merely harmful or oppressive.We argue that emotional injustice occurs when individuals' emotions are treated or used in ways that impose arbitrary relational disadvantage-disadvantages that arise from treatment, regard or social structures and position people differently relative to one another for normatively extraneous reasons. By contrast, emotional harms involve suffering without relational disadvantage, while emotional oppression is systemic and group-directed and targets members of marginalized groups.Building on relational theories of equality, we argue that emotional injustice is inherently relational and operates across a continuum of social positions. Privileged individuals may be constrained by emotion norms, such as prohibitions against vulnerability or dependence, that paradoxically reinforce their social position. Marginalized individuals, by contrast, may face emotional injustices that directly reinforce subordination, as when emotion norms delegitimize their anger or constrain their emotional expression.

Two approaches dominate the literature on the construction of emotions: transitory role theory and the more recent Conceptual Act Theory. We identify two ways in which these approaches would benefit from correction, revision, or further development. First, they tend to downplay the body, insisting that social forces work primarily at a conceptual level. That is, culture is considered to primarily impact the conceptualization of emotion, not emotional embodiment. Second, they tend to neglect the impact social norms have on emotions. We include relevant work in traditions outside philosophy and psychology (sociology, anthropology, and queer theory) that may shed light on the impact of social norms on emotions, as well as the relationship between socialization and embodiment. We propose an account of emotions as constructs that combine sociality and corporeality—an account that understands social norms and bodily responses as interdependent. Our proposal is to understand emotions as constructed via societal norms that materialize in bodily states. This advances the debate on the nature of emotions by integrating different theoretical strands (construction and embodiment), and it also contributes to the emerging literature on emotional injustice by shedding light on the role the social plays, for example, in shaping whose body gets to express which emotions.