Emotion, with Billy Holzberg

Emojis! Feminism! Rage! Sociologist Billy Holzberg joins us to talk about emotion. Why is it dismissed as an obstacle to progress and clear thinking – and to whose benefit? How can we let anger into politics without sanctioning far-right violence? And why are some of us freer than others to play with emotional abjection? Billy reflects on all this and more with Alexis and Rosie, celebrating thinkers from Sara Ahmed to Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois to Yasmin Gunaratnam.

Billy also reflects on queerness, childhood and shame; the emotional precarity of TV’s Fleabag; the playfulness of emojis; and the desperate but subversive power of the hunger striker. Plus: a welcome clarification of the slippery line between affect and emotion.

Guest: Billy Holzberg
Hosts: Rosie Hancock, Alexis Hieu Truong
Executive Producer: Alice Bloch
Sound Engineer: David Crackles
Music: Joe Gardner
Artwork: Erin Aniker

Find more about Uncommon Sense at The Sociological Review.

Episode Resources

Billy, Rosie, Alexis and our producer Alice recommended

• Jim Hubbard’s documentary “United in Anger: A history of ACT UP”
• The idea of thinking sociologically with Emojis
• Robert Munsch and Sheila McGraw’s children’s book “Love You Forever”
• Lesley Jamison’s essay collection “The Empathy Exams”

From The Sociological Review

• “Everyone shows emotions everywhere but class photos” – Laura Harris
• “‘Serenity Now!’ Emotion management and solidarity in the workplace” – Jordan McKenzie, et al.
• “Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’” – Lisa Amanda Palmer

By Billy Holzberg

• “The Multiple Lives of Affect: A Case Study of Commercial Surrogacy”
• “‘Wir schaffen das’: Hope and hospitality beyond the humanitarian border”
• “The affective life of heterosexuality: heteropessimism and postfeminism in Fleabag” (co-author: Aura Lehtonen)

Further readings

• “The Cultural Politics of Emotion” – Sara Ahmed
• “Death and the Migrant: Bodies, Borders and Care” – Yasmin Gunaratnam
• “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” – Karl Marx 
• “Postcolonial Melancholia” – Paul Gilroy
• “The Souls of Black Folk” – W.E.B. Du Bois
• The work of psychologist Paul Ekman
• “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” – Audre Lorde
• “The Politics of Compassion: Immigration and Asylum Policy” – Ala Sirriyeh
• “Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy” – Carolyn Pedwell
• “The Spiritualization of Politics and the Technologies of Resistant Body: Conceptualizing Hunger Striking Subjectivity” – Ashjan Ajour
• “On Heteropessimism” – Asa Seresin

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