Emotion Language and Social Power: Homosexuality and Narratives of Pain in Church

This paper examines the narratives of pain in two religious groups to explore how the everyday concept of emotional pain can work to obscure differences between opposing sides. It shows how these narratives can effectively help to reproduce so-cial hierarchies, even as actors seek to challenge them. Specifically, by examining church debates about homosexuality, it shows how putatively heterosexual actors on both sides use languages of pain to justify welcoming gays into the church, albeit on very different terms, while creating particular feeling rules for gay men and lesbians (Hochschild 1979, 1983). By comparing these two sides we see how narratives of pain (and the shared assumptions behind them) effectively help to reproduce the sexual hierarchy some members seek to subvert. KEY WORDS: emotions; pain; sexuality; Protestant; social movements. Since Arlie Russell Hochschild’s pioneering article on feeling rules and emotion work (1979), sociologists have been aware that people manage emo-tions in everyday life. More recently, Ann Swidler (2001) has examined how emotion language mediates between culture and the person to sustain social or-ganization; she calls our attention to the sets of terms and categories available for turning disparate and ineffable sensations into socially recognized emotions (see also Lutz 1986; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990; Reddy 1997; Thoits 1989, 1990). Building on this literature, I show how the ways people talk about emo-tions with regard to difficult social issues help to shape feeling rules and di-rect how those issues my be resolved. Specifically, I show how narratives of pain shape the possible local-level outcomes of broad-scale church conflicts over homosexuality