Thus, affect is ever-present in everything that we do. It is what George Bernard Shaw called the Life Force that makes us do one thousand things—and all unconsciously. As Silvan Tomkins, a key affect theorist, wrote: Yet affect theorists must use words, and when it comes to describing the affects, those words are hard to distinguish from what others call emotions.
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Other affect theorists have added to the list: If bodies are bounded and isolated, they come in genders. But if they are defined in relation to others, as affect theory has it, they are more complicated. Perhaps they are gendered only by their differences from those with whom they have relations. Perhaps their gender is simply a kind of performance. The key question for the historian of emotions is whether gender determines, changes, challenges, or is irrelevant to emotional life.
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But what is gender? Is it the same as sex? Are there two genders or more—or less? Historians have different takes on the topic, and it must be said that notions of gender are changing very fast: Until the s or so, historians —and scientists as well—made the male subject the standard. Studies of women in history appeared, and, as a sort of parallel, the American Psychological Association set up a division on the Psychology of Women.
The most straightforward historical studies of the gendered body and its emotions ask quite simply whether the emotional lives of women were different from those of today. For example, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote about passionately affectionate female relationships in nineteenth-century America. Smith-Rosenberg rejected that interpretation. The problem with this sort of history is that it tends to code emotion female and reason male.
History of emotions
The solution is to research male emotional life alongside female: But, inevitably, some of the articles in her edited books problematize that approach, showing similarities in the emotions fostered in men and women; or they suggest that class may be more important than gender in the socialization process.
Where, then, is the history of emotions today? And what does the future hold?
The answer to the first question is quite clear: Some of the reasons have to do with the frisson of automaticity, irrationality, of emotions out of control and overwhelming us. Others are connected to the revolution in gender and gender relations taking place today. Finally, there is the undeniable importance of the body in determining our birth and our death, as well as much of what is in between. Yet, as historians, we cannot but note that Western thought has tended to oscillate between privileging the mind and giving primacy to the body.
Historians of emotions, with their vision over the long haul, are well-positioned to point out —and this is our hope for the future—that emotions are and have always been a compound of both. Emotion and Personality , 2 vols. The History of Emotions. The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers. Destroying Order, Structuring Disorder.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Appraisal Theories of Emotion: State of the Art and Future Development. Emotion Review 5 , The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture. Translated by Catherine Misrahi. Fordham University Press [orig. Translated by Sarah Thomas and Paul House.
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History and Theory 55 , Translated by Keith Tribe. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. What Is the History of Emotions?
Emotions in History - Oxford University Press
Essays on Culture and Everyday Life pp. Translated by Michael Robertson. The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America. Signs 1 , Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards. American Historical Review 90 , University of Chicago Press. Keltner and Cordaro vs. Old and New in the History of Emotions. A Very Short History. In the last decade, the history of emotions has developed into an increasing productive and intellectually stimulating area of historical research.
Similar to the sociology of emotions or anthropology of emotions, the history of emotions is based on the assumption that not only the expression of feelings, but also the feelings themselves are learned. Culture and history are changing and so are feelings as well as their expression. The social relevance and potency of emotions is historically and culturally variable.
In the view of many historians, emotion is, therefore, just as fundamental a category of history, as class , race or gender. A number of different methodological approaches have been discussed in recent years.
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Some historians of the emotions limit their research to the historical analysis of emotional norms and rules under the heading of emotionology. Currently fundamental methodological concepts include: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Victoria to Freud, 5 volumes, New York Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards, in: The American Historical Review 90, 4 , p.
The Historical Ethnography of Emotions, in: Current Anthropology 38,3 , p. A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion, in: History and Theory 51, no. Rosenwein, Worrying about Emotions in History, in: