ABSTRACT
Nussbaum’s insistence that emotions are integral to reasoning and political engagement reverberates within current scholarship in emotion cultures, scholarship that focuses on what might be called the politics of affect-how emotions influence and are influenced by the power relations that shape our daily lives. This scholarship1 shares several, integral objectives: to resist the tropes of interiority that have, for so long, dominated Western discussions of affect; to historicize cultural perceptions about and corporeal expressions of emotions; and to gain new understanding of what philosopher Alison Jaggar calls “emotional hegemony”—the processes through which dominant groups struggle to regulate the epistemic potential of emotions, thereby determining which affective expressions are valued or devalued, in particular contexts.
