CHAPTER 26 Emotions and Social Movements

The study of emotions in politics and protest has emerged (or reemerged) in the past decade through a messy inductive process of recognizing the obvious: Emotions of many sorts permeate political action. In grappling with the inadequacies of existing theories of politics, researchers grabbed pieces of emotion theory opportunistically where they could find them. Few existing approaches in the sociology of emotion have been applied systematically, much less compared, in this field, but almost all have found their way into the mix to some degree. This inductive and relatively atheoretical approach may make social movements a useful venue for comparing theories of emotions developed in other settings. We begin with a review of the place of emotions in the field of collective behavior and then social movements over the past 100 years, as they fell out of explanations in the 1970s, only to reemerge in the late 1990s (for more details, see Goodwin et al., 2000, from which we draw). We then look at recent research that has tried to specify the role of emotions in social movements and related forms of political action, categorizing this research crudely by the type of interactional setting in which the emotions are generated and displayed. Finally, we reach out to theoretical perspectives in the sociology of emotions, suggesting ways that research from movements could be extended to engage these theories more explicitly than it has in the past. Aristotle launched the study of emotions and politics almost 2,400 years ago by examining the effects of orators on audiences—insights buried first by the rationalistic traditions of recent centuries and later by the structural predispositions of sociology. By pointing out the different interactive contexts of meaning and feeling (such as leaders and followers, recruiters and poten-tial recruits, insiders and outsiders, pairs of opponents, and so on), we suggest Aristotle—an