Book Review: Gender, Emotions and Power, 1750–2020, By Hannah Parker, Josh Doble

Extract:

This book begins with an ambitious question: how has gender historically been constructed through the attribution of particular emotions to particular groups? And, relatedly, how have emotions been practised by those groups to reinforce or contest gendered power relations? Starting from the premise that neither gender nor emotion are pre-given, the book examines how each constructed the other, and how this in turn maintained differences of class, race and nation in Europe, its colonies and China over three centuries. The authors’ aim is to historicise and destabilise the gendered politics of emotion today: an urgent task in the era of rising white masculinist populism and continuing use of essentialising tropes of ‘women’s emotions’ in the context of widespread revelations of sexual harassment.

One of the book’s key—and welcome—interventions is to expand the scope of history of emotions beyond Europe. Chapters are organised around a combination of geography and theme, each part contributing to a major historiographical debate within or beyond the history of emotions. Part One explores how women since the 1920s constructed, or were placed within, ‘emotional communities’ which reoriented gender norms and established their political role, whether as grieving mothers in Soviet Russia (Hannah Parker), heroines in Maoist war films (Yucong Hao), or wives of striking dockers in 1990s Liverpool (Emma Copestake). Part Two examines how gender and emotion intersected in the production of whiteness and power in the British empire, from inter-war Southern Rhodesia (Nicola Ginsburgh) to colonial and post-colonial Kenya and Zambia (Josh Doble). The final part of the book considers how involvement in the public sphere was conditioned by representations of ideal and deviant gender types and emotions associated with these, such as the eighteenth-century polite gentleman (Michael Rowland) or nineteenth-century revolutionary woman (Hannah Proctor). Grouping chapters in this way allows for unexpected connections across time and place. It also foregrounds, in all three parts, the political importance of gendered emotion, particularly in terms of social and political belonging: Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of emotional communities features in six of eleven chapters. While this shows a unifying concern, it was also an opportunity to refine the concept which might have been pushed further: are emotional communities found in all times and places? How do they begin and end? Who decides what makes an emotional community?