Laurencia Sáenz Benavides

In this paper, I examine some of the emotional dimensions of oppression under the heading of “emotional alienation.” If the experience of oppression is affectively attuned, then resisting oppression will likely involve dealing with these difficult, often painful, feelings. Resistance may require finding ways of pushing back against their potentially disempowering effects and developing other, more empowering, ways of feeling. Longlasting forms of social oppression have a strong hold in people’s sense of self. Resistance, then, requires self-transformation. If emancipation requires undoing disempowering emotional patterns, then self-transformation will require “undoing” ourselves. How is this undoing tied to developing a new consciousness? How does developing a “radically altered consciousness” (Bartky 1990) involve radically changing our ways of feeling? In this paper, I will argue that emotional disalienation need not be thought of in terms of suppressing or excising disempowering emotional patterns. I will contend that narrative thinking, as a relational process, can play an effective role in the struggle towards emancipation.

In analytic philosophy, discussion of oppression has focused on its definition. However, whilst definitional approaches are valuable as a means of achieving conceptual clarity, they tend to underplay a key aspect of oppression: its embodied, emotional dimension. If we attend to the descriptions of oppression offered in narratives and first-personal accounts, by the oppressed, the centrality of emotions comes to the fore. In this thesis I argue that attending to the role of emotions is crucial to producing an explanatorily rich account of racial and gender oppression. In contrast to those philosophical models that conceive of emotions as primarily episodic, disruptive and short-lived, I argue that we need to think of emotions as long-lived “patterns” (Goldie, 2012) or “attunements” (Bartky, 1990). Only by doing so can we properly explain their role in oppression. Moreover, attending to the relational aspect of emotions (Ahmed, 2004) allows us to account for the ways structures of power operate. Not only are some emotional phenomena partly shaped by oppressive structures, they also play an instrumental role in sustaining and reinforcing them. I contend that, by conceptualising emotions as mechanisms for reproducing structures of power, we can shed light on individuals’ complicity and participation in oppression. By showing how oppressors have an emotional investment in structures of oppression, and how emotions “can attach us to the very conditions of our subordination” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 12), we can identify one of the reasons of the pervasiveness of oppression.