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"While men and women do not differ in the frequency with which they experience anger, women experience more intense anger than men, and once angered, women are more likely to talk about their anger whereas men are more likely to use substances (Schieman, 2006; Simon &Lively, 2010). Simon and Lively (2010) argued that the more intense and persistent anger of women compared to men may contribute to women’s high rate of depression . Examining a national sample of respondents, they found an association between intense and persistent anger and greater depression for  women." Jan E. Stets (2012), "Current Emotion Research in Sociology: Advances in the Discipline", Emotion Review , 4(3): 330.

"Deference - or the capacity to place oneself in a 'one down' position vis-à-vis others - is a characteristic demanded of all those in disadvantaged structural positions, including women, racial-ethnic minorities, and others in subordinate structural statuses. When deference is made a job requirement, members of structurally disadvantaged groups are likely to be overrepresented in such jobs or even be seen as better suited for the work than members of more advantaged groups." Amy S. Wharton (2009), "The Sociology of Emotional Labor", The Annual Review of Sociology, 36: 147-165.

"While the gay and lesbian liberation movements of the 1970s still aimed for  radical social and cultural change , the 1980s saw a modelling of queer diversity along the lines of an ethnicized, multicultural politics of recognition (Taylor 1992). [...] It has been argued that neoliberal politics have taken central concerns of sexual politics inspired by the civil rights era such as freedom and liberation and remapped them in terms of privacy, consumption and domestic bliss (Gluckman and Reed 21997; Duggan 2003; Richardson 2004, 2005; Katz 2005; Weiss 2008; Engel 2009). The fight for equality has by now taken centre stage for mainstream LGBT organizations in North America and Western Europe, the argument being that gays and lesbians are, and need to be recognized as, responsible citizens like any (heterosexual) other. [...]  When in 1997, organizers of the main gay pride parade [...] [in Berlin] started to demand fees for participating floats, rebel protester...

I just read this article  about "love in capitalist times", which resonates with many of the things that have been on mind since some time now ( although I do not identify with everything that is said here) . T he article is in Polish, so I translated an excerpt for those of you who do not speak Polish (big mistake, big mistake folks :p): “Concerning the ‘games’ and ‘intrigues’ that women are said to play in romantic relationships – the world forces them to do so. That’s also why jokes and memes about [a so-called] ‘female logic’ or rather women’s lack thereof, about how difficult it is to understand women, and how absurd is their ‘thinking something, doing something else’ principle, are misplaced. It’s not a question of [a female] nature, but of socialization. It’s a bit as if you trained a dog and then made fun of him for obeying. It’s true – it is difficult to really learn to know and understand someone who has been taught that telling the truth about their needs and de...

Spoiler alert: don’t read if you intend to read/watch “The Girl on the Train” I just saw the film adaptation of the British bestseller “The Girl on the Train” and it made me see more clearly the utterly political aspect of the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ trope. The film shows an alcoholic woman who is gaslighted by her (former) husband into thinking that she is prone to angry and violent outbursts during her drinking blackouts. The manipulation not only makes her doubt her sanity, but leads her to think she killed another woman. Although I do not really care for the thriller and crime story aspect of the film, I found it interesting because it resonates with the white western misogynist and racist ideal of emotional restraint that hurts so many people (the ‘crazy ex-girlfriend’ trope, the ‘angry black woman’ trope, etc.). Emotions are political folks, and let’s pause for a second to thank second-wave feminists for pointing it out so clearly to us, despite all the shortcomings of t...

I was just reading feminist psychiatrist Jean Baker Miller who wrote that "women, by their very existence, confront and challenge men because they have been made the embodiment of the dominant culture's unsolved problems" (Baker Miller 1988: 58). Baker Miller was talking about emotions and the issues Western culture had with them, but this statement is now true for women wearing the hijab (or the burkini) in France and beyond. Those women are reified and denied individuality  in a very gendered racist manner. French authorities fight the presence of veiled women in public because it challenges the implicit racial segregation of space (no, veiled women do not exist in the sole parallel world of the banlieue, they inhabit the country as a whole, beaches, school trips, and all), and forces white people to face the fact that their (post)colonial domination over the rest of the world (home and abroad) is fading. The post's title comes from this article .

"[W]hen we speak of housework we are not speaking of a job as other jobs, but we are speaking of the most pervasive manipulation, the most subtle and mystified violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class. True, under capitalism every worker is manipulated and exploited and his/her relation to capital is totally mystified. The wage gives the impression of a fair deal: you work and you get paid, hence you and your boss are equal; while in reality the wage, rather than paying for the work you do, hides all the unpaid work that goes into profit. But the wage at least recognizes that you are a worker, and you can bargain and struggle around and against the terms and the quantity of that wage, the terms and the quantity of that work. [...]  But in the case of housework the situation is qualitatively different. The difference lies in the fact that not only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attrib...

I do not agree with the way Illouz talks of the 'seduction' love exercizes on women in the last excerpt hereunder. I think it is the legacy of most of pre-modern history, through which Western women were not left much choice as to the sphere of life they wanted to express themselves in. It is not that they were particularly 'seduced' by love, it is just that they were relegated to it. Love was socially constructed as a 'female' domain, in which they had to thrive and to invest, lest they be branded ugly, masculine or spinsters (the hidden and common theme of these three patriarchal scarecrows being of course heternormativity, with its correlates of lesbo- and transphobia). And the same goes for the domestic sphere and care. Although it seems that Illouz falls here into what she denounces throughout the book (the making of social phenomena into individual struggles and responsibilities), I still find her observations enlightening.  "Precisely because we...

"A contemporary Catherine [the heroine of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights ] or Emma [the heroine of Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] would have spent a great deal of time reflecting and talking about their pain and likely found its causes in their own (or their lovers') deficient childhood. They would have derived a sense of glory not from the experience of grief, but precisely from having overcome it, through an arsenal of self-help therapeutic techniques. [T]he search for love [in high modern times] is an agonizingly difficult experience from which few modern men and women have been spared. [...] Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. [...] The Freudian culture in which we are steeped has made the forceful claim that sexual attraction is best explained by our past experiences, and that the love preference is formed in early life in the relationship be...

" The Ragged Trousers Philanthropists suggest how much worse it is to be a man of principle trapped in the same system, to know with dreadful clarity what is oppressing and wasting you, but to be powerless to do anything about it, except proselytise and wriggle and rant." Andy Miller (2014), The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books (and Two Not-So-Great Ones) Saved my Life , London, Fourth Estate: 59.

"I would suggest, though, that there is a sense in which all materialisms are ‘new’ materialisms, and this is because there very notion of materiality must have a gestural or oppositional component. One might say that any intellectual movement must be somewhat uncharitable to its previous generation in order to establish a difference, and one might also say that intellectual movements as such come in dialectical response to each other; after years of insisting on the importance of social and linguistic construction, one would turn back to materiality, and then perhaps be critical of a too-immediate emphasis on matter. That may be so, but there is something about the problem of feminist materiality that is far more insistent than the standard philosophical squabbles that toggle back and forth between idealism and realism , or historicism and absolutism (or any other series of conflicts and oppositions). If one looks over the debates regarding matter, materialis...

"It’s not just emotional work that’s supposed to come free of charge. Feminist scholar Silvia Federici  wrote  in 1975: ‘[N]ot only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work. In its turn, the unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work, thus preventing women from struggling against it, except in the privatized kitchen-bedroom quarrel that all society agrees to ridicule, thereby further...

"La ségrégation exerce, enfin, un effet idéologique de dissimulation de la hiérarchie entre les sexes [ça marche aussi avec "entre riches et pauvres", "entre blancs et racisés", ...], en rendant les deux groupes 'incomparables', et en empêchant donc que les inégalités apparaissent jamais 'toutes choses égales par ailleurs" Laure Béreni, Sébastien Chauvin, Alexandre Jaunait, Anne Révillard, Introduction aux études sur le genre , Bruxelles, De Boeck, 2012 (2ème édition): 114.

"When I was a child, I'd go to my grandmother's house and start writing. When I picked up my pencil, she'd tell me that in her day, left-handers would be forced to write with their right hands, which seemed ridiculous to me. Luckily, those days were over and although my left-handedness is still treated as a curiosity by people who expect me to have terrible script, I can write as I wish - but sometimes I imagine how absurd, not to mention vindictive, a campaign to return to this would look, and wonder if we'll ever reach a similar point where my transition is quietly accepted as a matter of bodily autonomy." [...] "Whereas gay and lesbian activists opposed pathologisation and the resultant aversion therapies, transsexual people understood that mental health services offered access to hormones and surgery, as long as they satisfied the gatekeeping requirements of the psychiatrists - which often demanded that transsexual women show a very tradition...

Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 21/11/2011 Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 12/03/2014 EDIT Louvain-la-Neuve campus, 17/09/2014

"In the heterosexual community, aptitude for seduction is a woman's ultimate quality: it is best rewarded, best acknowledged. Any other feature, like expressing yourself, being funny, having ambition, aggression, strength, spirit must be underplayed, so it doesn't get in the way of your seduction. I still have a strong distrust of femininity because it's always primarily defining you in terms of what use others can make of you. Will they be excited, reassured, healed, understood, taken care of? It always distances you from your sincere emotions. [...] To be feminine is a fake power. It is the same as drugs: a very immediate, very intense, very funny experience. But any power that is easily given and obtained should be watched over carefully. It might be a gross hallucination. [...] I respect some people's decisions to spread their wings inside the romantic or sexual seduction field, but I'd claim other fields for women as well, which wouldn't evolve...

"The Republican abuse of the term 'feminism' in the past decade or so is an astonishing lesson in the politically opportunistic use of language. Where the Right would have once bundled queers, leftists, feminists, peaceniks and other sundry misfits together as internal enemies of the state, when it came to providing reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan, in particular, the language of feminism was suddenly plucked from the dustbin of history as a specifically 'Western' value. [...] The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were both justified by an appeal to the emancipation of women, and the discourse of feminism was specifically invoked. [...] The battle for public support for the wars was played out through a combination of the liberal 'feminist' discourse of rights and the hawkish premise that only carpet-bombing the oppressive enemy could solve the problem. Just as the Bush administration neglected to ask their experienced diplomats about other ways in ...

"La marchandisation fait des subjectivités sexuelles et de genre des identités que l'on peut acquérir en consommant. Rosemary Hennessy (1995) et Alan Sears (2005) s'intéressent à la façon dont le néolibéralisme, qui colonise en général l'ensemble des champs sociaux de manière à les rendre marchands, a investi en particulier les identités sexuelles et de genre pour en faire des ''styles de vie'' ( lifestyle ) qui se caractérisent par un ensemble de biens et de pratiques à acheter, à consommer de façon individuelle. Un ensemble de bars, magasins, produits, vêtements, voyages, etc. constituent un " pink market " qui participe de la construction d'une subjectivité LGBTQI reconnaissable. [...] La marchandisation des identités LGBT (mais la remarque vaut de façon bien plus générale pour la marchandisation de l'ensemble des identités - et du désir - dans le néolibéralisme) engendre de fortes inégalités : les personnes qui n'ont pas les m...

"Ungrateful conservatives often complain about the political correctness of liberals, but the liberalism that strives to achieve equality by celebrating diversity is a liberalism that every conservative should love and that opponents of the liberal elite have put to good use. What the commitment to diversity seeks is not a society in which there are no poor people but one in which there's nothing wrong with being poor, a society in which poor people - like blacks and Jews and Asians - are respected. And in the effort to create such a world, liberalism has ended up playing a useful if no doubt unintended role, the role of supplying the right with just the kind of left it wants. What the right wants is culture wars instead of class wars because as long as the wars are about identity instead of money, it doesn't matter who wins. And the left gives it what it wants". Walter Benn Michaels (2006), The Trouble with Diversity. How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore I...

"Dans le champ de la philosophie, ça s'est peut être passé différemment du reste des humanités et des sciences sociales parce que, dans ce domaine, les féministes n'ont jamais réussi à avoir beaucoup d'impact sur le courant dominant de la philosophie analytique. Etant donné la façon dont cette discipline fonctionne, nous avons été forcées de prendre une voie séparatiste, en quelque sorte, ce qui a eu des inconvénients sur le plan intellectuel. [...] Ce que je veux dire, c'est que la philosophie féministe est devenue une discipline en soi et qu'elle n'a jamais pénétré les autres champs. [...] [Aux Etats-Unis], les études de genre, l'histoire féministe, tout cela a changé la façon dont tous les historiens pensent, mis à part pour quelques spécimens paléolithiques, mais la philosophie féministe n'a jamais eu ce type d'impact. Le courant dominant continue comme si nous n'existions pas - et nous avons constitué nos propres sociétés, nos journau...