Political Emotions - 9780415880541

The editors (professors of communication, English, art & and art history, and women's & gender studies at the U. of Texas at Austin) present 11 papers from an October 2008 conference that addressed the relevance of the study of discourses, rhetoric, or framing of emotion to understandings of the public sphere, civil society, and the political. The conference grew out of the work of the "Public Feelings" research group, which includes under its research concerns: "the study of sentimentality, trauma, intimacy, cultural formations that are organized around affective life, the gendering of affect, the relation between sexuality and emotion, and more." The resultant proceedings, as one might guess, are diverse and include discussions of such topics as the affective effects of torture at Guantanamo on the American public, the construction of dolls intended to evoke emotional attachment and their sale on eBay, political emotions and the gothic in Ann Radcliffe's 1794 novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, the relationship between the HIV/AIDS pandemic in South Africa as individual/subjective and social/public experience, and South Asian queer diasporic affect in the works of visual artists Allan deSouza and Chitra Ganesh, to name a few examples. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)