ABSTRACT
This chapter first considers ten contemporary outlooks on insecurity as a problematic emotional experience whose causes range from inborn features to impersonal structural forces, acculturation, political and cultural manipulation, othering, and reaction to change. By producing the meaning of self-threats, these views inform our experience of insecurities as problems with solutions. The chapter then introduces embodied in/capacity theory as an integrated approach to emotional insecurity focusing on the inner dialectical tensions that animate our emotional lives. In/securities are feelings of self-threat that imply parallel feelings of self-security. In/securities incorporate and generate context in a drive to act on problems. This perspective examines the sociological stressors, moral stresses, and emotives that form the context in which emotional insecurities differentiate into self-endangerment feelings such as injustice, jealousy, exhaustion, and inadequacy. Cultural problematizations of insecurity contribute to this differentiation, the appraisal of insecure states, and what we do about them. As discursive expressions of anxiety, these problematizations activate and orient the individual and collective problem-solving drives that respond to sociological stressors. Finally, the chapter presents a typology of forms of insecurity and anxiety applied to late-modern life in its social (identity and status), cognitive (perception and motivation), and affective (sensitivity and aptitude) dimensions.
