Kate Villa

This dissertation contributes to feminist critiques of moral responsibility by exposing cases where asymmetries of blame perpetuate oppression by diminishing or disabling the moral agency of individuals from traditionally subordinated social groups. It also engages the recent literature on “affective injustice,” briefly defined as a wrong done to someone at the level of their emotional life. In the first chapter, I connect feminist critiques of moral responsibility with the concept of affective injustice by arguing that the moral wrong that lies at the heart of affective injustice is the disabling of moral agency of oppressed groups through inapt and oppressive blaming practices. In the following chapters, I expand on this claim by exposing cases where blame diminishes the agency of some and bolsters the agency of the oppressor. Chapter two details how cultural domination produces alienation from a community, resulting in the disabling of agency. Chapter three problematizes the assumed function of blame as agency-enhancing by developing examples where blame instead augments emotions like fear and shame, which diminish agency. Chapter four focuses on the case of catcalling in which the victim takes responsibility for the aggression, thus protecting and enabling the perpetrator. To conclude, I discuss the limitations of focusing on blame and gesture to future directions that work on affective injustice could take by shifting the focus to feminist emotions.

In this paper, I argue that the social norms that underlie our emotion regulation practices can result in further oppression of girls and women under conditions of patriarchy. One aspect of this oppression is the disproportionate responsibility for emotions that is taken on by girls and women in the wake of emotional distress caused by misogynistic aggression. I show that although emotion-regulation techniques are understood as ideal tools for enhancing agency and subjective well-being, and emotional labor is not necessarily oppressive, they may not only enable a perpetrator’s ability to evade accountability but also, by outsourcing emotional regulation, allow the perpetrator to fail to cultivate emotional intelligence, which leads to a vicious cycle. In these cases, girls and women also face a double bind. If certain emotion-regulation practices succeed in aligning emotions with dominant social norms, we face emotional labor that not only benefits the regulator but feeds the cycle described above, and we face alienation from our apt feelings. If we fail to regulate our emotions by accepted standards and patriarchal entitlements, we may be outcast, pathologized, or otherwise marginalized. I argue that the consequences of this double bind constitute a site of affective injustice and expose asymmetrical relations of moral accountability in evaluations of the fittingness of emotions.