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Page 1: Introduction: The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life

http://est.sagepub.com/European Journal of Social Theory

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 DOI: 10.1177/1368431004041747

2004 7: 123European Journal of Social TheoryMary Holmes

Introduction: The Importance of Being Angry: Anger in Political Life  

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IntroductionThe Importance of Being Angry: Angerin Political Life

Mary HolmesUNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND

The sociology of emotion is rapidly becoming a popular field in sociology and thisspecial issue of EJST turns that interest to the sphere of politics. The main objec-tive of this issue is to provide an understanding of the sociological importance ofemotions, and specifically anger, in political life. Rather than addressing theextremely complicated interrelationship between different emotions, the contri-butions are focused on anger. As will become evident, this is no random choicebut based on the assumption that ‘one can define anger as the essential politicalemotion’ (Lyman, 1981: 61). Via this assumption the articles engage with the soci-ology of emotion and with questions of how and why people do politics. Angermatters politically because it both motivates and continues to fuel activity andconflict. Analysis of anger can also assist in the exploration of the supposed person-alization of politics. Does anger inevitably contribute to nationalism, racism, self-centred individualism and division, or does it challenge injustice, resist thebureaucratization of politics and allow greater celebration of diversity?

‘Politics’ here refers both to state and international dealings between poli-ticians and to more participatory political activity and to the politics of everydaylife. The definitions of anger are also open. Broadly, the editor and many of thecontributors tend towards the idea that anger is something recognized as aresponse to perceived injustice. This assumes anger is relational – something wedo (or do not do) as part of our interaction with others. Contributors distinguishanger from aggression and hostility and attend to the different social meaningsof anger as they are expressed or contained in different social and political circum-stances. While each contributor has various interpretations of what anger means,in general, a sociological definition is one which avoids seeing emotions as‘inbuilt’ mental or bodily reactions or instincts. Crossley (1995: 143) suggeststhat ‘[a]nger, for example, is not situated in an inner mental (emotional) realm.It is an aspect or feature of the way we behave towards that with which we areangry.’ He draws on Merleau-Ponty’s anti-Cartesian argument that we should notsee mental affirmations of subjectivity as taking place within an individual bodybut as ‘publicly verifiable aspects of embodied conduct or behaviour’ (Crossley,1995: 143). Crossley explains how this is played out in Goffman’s work andclearly this tradition contributes to Hochschild’s highly influential work onemotion management, which I refer to briefly below (and see my article later).

European Journal of Social Theory 7(2): 123–132

Copyright © 2004 Sage Publications: London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi

www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1368431004041747

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Yet, so far, little social theory has attended to the relationship between anger andpolitics. However, my intention is not to provide a detailed review of existingliterature on emotions in politics, as that would be to replicate discussions withinthe individual articles. Instead I provide a brief impression of the gaps in theliterature which this issue fills, beginning with an assessment of political soci-ology’s sparse attention to emotions.

Political sociology, while displaying an early interest in emotions, has onlyrecently returned to that interest. The emotions involved in social movementpolitics have perhaps received the most attention. Many collections, like Silenceand Voice in Contentious Politics (Aminzade et al., 2001), barely touch onemotions, this particular volume having one chapter on the topic, but others aremore forthcoming. Passionate Politics (Goodwin et al., 2001) re-establishes theimportance of understanding emotions when studying social movements,discussing the interplay between rationality and irrationality. Within the collec-tion, a range of emotions are discussed, both in their theoretical and theirconcrete manifestations within particular social movements. While useful inexploring the shifting place of emotions in movement activity, it wavers betweenbeing overly general about emotions and not general enough about politics.Anger becomes one emotion among others within rather specific oppositionalpolitical forms. Even if looking at emotions in relation to more mainstreampolitical forms such as welfare politics (Hoggett, 2000), existing accounts saylittle or nothing about to what extent anger might be especially crucial. Bookson specific aspects of politics, such as ethnic conflict management (e.g. Ross andRothman, 1999), often provide no analysis of emotions at all. However, MabelBerezin (2002) has recently attempted to set out a ‘political sociology of emotion’which requires a brief elaboration.

In trying to think through how emotions matter to politics Berezin suggeststhat it is necessary to deal with the analytical difficulties of connecting individu-ally experienced emotions to collectively enacted politics. She maintains that theseproblems can be overcome by using the concepts of secure state and community offeeling. The secure state (the modern nation-state being the model) is, she argues,based on emotional attachment to the entity that protects people from threats andprovides stability and security. Communities of feeling are, in contrast, a-struc-tural and transient. They are about a collective expression of emotional energy(Berezin, 2002: 39). These unpredictable events can be staged but those that arisespontaneously are often easier and more effectively used by politicians. She citesTony Blair’s appropriation of the emotional response to Princess Diana’s death.Thus, although communities of feeling are responses to events outside politicalinstitutions, they can be used by those serving the institutions (or indeed chal-lenging them, as social movements do) to produce solidarity. Solidarity, shesuggests, is politically crucial because it enables people to feel secure. She seems toimply that solidarity is about sameness in that ‘constructing similarity producessecurity, stability and loyalty’ (Berezin, 2002: 47). But solidarity is maintainedpartly through exclusion and, despite attempts to acknowledge this, Berezin doesnot adequately deal with the issue of what security may mean for those who are

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cast as the threat. When Berezin argues that people want security and will investemotionally in politics when it is threatened, she is leaving us to conclude thatthose who live in ‘insecure’ states are both more political and more emotional.This is close to conforming to dangerous imagined oppositions between calmrational subjects in ‘advanced’ nations and irrational ‘extremists’ in the developingworld. Such a position is reached, I suspect, because she characterizes emotions asindividually experienced. Her conception of communities of feeling suggests thatindividuals occasionally happen to feel together but this remains vague and shefails to adequately make use of sociological theories about the relational construc-tion of emotions. Thus, Berezin is right to suggest that ‘much theoretical, analyticand empirical work remains to be done in the study of politics and emotions’(2002: 33). This will require work not only within political sociology but moreattention to political life within the sociology of emotions.

Most work on the sociology of emotions (for example, Bendelow andWilliams, 1998; Hochschild, 1983; 1997; Lupton, 1998) tends either to not dealwith politics at all, or to deal only with a certain aspect of politics. Jack Barbalet(2001) comes closest in that his detailed consideration of emotions in social lifedeals with issues such as class resentment. However, Barbalet is dealing withspecific emotions and anger is not one of them. Historian Theodore Zeldin(1979) is one of the few authors who have tried to recognize the role of anger inpublic politics. He looks at politics in France from 1848 to 1945, but the detailedhistorical focus fails to produce much in the way of useful generalizations aboutemotions and politics. More useful in that sense is Deborah Lupton’s (1998)monograph on The Emotional Self. This could be seen as an investigation of thepolitics of the personal, although she is examining subjectivity, rather thanpolitics specifically. The Bendelow and Williams (1998) collection on Emotionsin Social Life does not mention politics, except where briefly discussed in relationto masculinity politics by Victor Seidler (see also Seidler, 1991). This dearth ofattention may be because exploring emotions in politics has analytical problems,as Philippe Braud (1996) has argued. Braud’s work is not presently available inEnglish translation, but some of the problems he raises are addressed in thisspecial issue. Whether or not analytical problems are the cause, discussions ofpolitics often give no, or limited, attention to emotions. Meanwhile discussionsof emotions give little thought to politics. This volume therefore offers an import-ant contribution to both political sociology and the sociology of emotion. Tofurther explain why anger should be the focus of this contribution a brief historyof social meanings of anger within Western societies is required.

The first major understanding of anger I want to examine critically is thestrand of Western thought that assumes expressing anger is a good thing in itself.Yet the relational and social contexts in which it is ‘good’ to express anger arehighly limited. Hochschild (1983) suggests in her sociology of emotions thatanger is subject to management, but this is a historically and culturally specificview. The expression of anger does appear to be discouraged within contemporaryAmerica, unless highly managed (Stearns and Stearns, 1986) and the therapeuticdiscourses there enlisted to manage angriness have spread within, and now

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beyond, the West (see Pupavac in this issue). Nevertheless, the condoning ofanger management is not universal or hegemonic. Stearns and Stearns (1986)document its recent historical emergence and locate it as American. Yet they stillassume (following Hochschild) that there have always been clear social rulesguiding angry and other emotional conduct (which they refer to as emotionol-ogy). They maintain this stance even when all the documentary evidence theycan gather for the period 1860 to 1930 has little to say on the topic and thenillustrates only a confusion of often contradictory injunctions. To summarizethese as ‘rules’ then seems a rather arbitrary exercise and it becomes purely amatter of speculation (1986: 97) as to how people’s actual behaviour in thatperiod might have related to those chaotic notions. Though ‘rules’ may havebecome clear to the Americans of the following decades, the very notion of tryingto constantly adjust our behaviour in line with social norms is perhaps itself ahistorical development which Foucault characterizes in terms of the emergenceof disciplinary regimes. However, any efforts to manage anger are partial andfragile if you dispense with the idea of a unitary self, aware of, and in control of,its thoughts and actions. In seeing emotions, including anger, as managed,Hochschild (1983) seems to assume some level of rational choice about what kindof emotions we will display, and when. This view privileges cognitive control.Though I would not wish to return to a (socio)biological account of emotion asa ‘hard-wired’ or instinctual response, I would wish to consider emotions ashaving elements that are beyond thought-out linguistic capture. Anger can feelmessily sensational, it can be partly somatic, partly ‘unconscious’. Does this sensa-tionalism lead to affinities with other theories about emotion that underlie themanaged approach, which was defined above as problematic for thinking aboutpolitics and anger?

Also underlying a managed approach to emotions is the second strand ofthought I want to examine about anger: that most familiarly expressed inFreudian and Neo-Freudian warnings about the dangers of repressing anger (seeLupton, 1998: 94–5). These are related to the former approach in that theypromote the expression of anger. However, it is not politicized anger at injusticethat is encouraged, but a ‘harmless’ (re)direction of angry feelings so that indi-vidual resolution can quickly ensue (see Craib, 1994). This arguably depoliticizedunderstanding of anger is closely related to political anger because both rely partlyon the Aristotelian assertion that only ‘dolts’ do not express anger when theyshould (Spelman, 1989; Swaine, 1996). Audre Lorde (1984), Peter Lyman (1981:62), and Elizabeth Spelman (1989: 268) have used Aristotle’s notion of the right-eousness of anger in trying to understand it as fundamental in political responsesto injustice. Lupton (1998: 81–4) suggests that this might have a history whenshe argues that emotionality itself became a form of resistance against theperceived enslavement of rational control that emerged in the late eighteenthcentury. Romanticism was a discourse within which the ‘passions were consideredthe wellsprings of human action’ (Lupton, 1998: 82). Yet anger is not inevitablyan element of resistance. The utility of properly channelled anger in creatingsuitably competitive entrepreneurial personalities for early capitalism was

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supposedly part of post-Victorian emotionology (Stearns and Stearns, 1986).Anger may be seen as useful but also as dangerous.

Co-existent with exhortations to (appropriately) express anger is encourage-ment to repress anger. Stoic philosophers’ belief in a civilized life as one thatavoids anger (Swaine, 1996: 259–63) is still recognizable in descriptions of peopleas ‘stoic’ in the face of provoking circumstances. As Spelman (1989) notes, it isoppressed groups in particular who have been encouraged to repress their anger.It is, in fact, one of the purposes of this volume to explore anger as a politicalresponse and tool. However, it seems clear that anger bears no ‘natural’ allegianceto the downtrodden and only through an analysis of anger as embedded withinsituated power relations can the anger of politics and the politics of anger be fruit-fully explored.

In pursuit of this goal, collected here are new articles on the complex relation-ships between anger and politics. The relationships between culture and politicaland institutional structures are discussed in order to better understand a varietyof types of political activity, from the globalized politics of international securityto more locally-based collective struggles for the redress of material and symbolicinequalities. The articles are grouped under three broad themes: (1) the generalimportance of anger in politics; (2) anger as it relates to political conflicts withinglobal and local contexts; and (3) the collective organization of political activityand identities around anger at injustice. Obviously these themes overlap andmany of the contributors touch on all of them; however, the articles are groupedaccording to their central emphasis.

The first theme is elaborated within Peter Lyman’s discussion of how theor-etical understandings of emotion can assist in the analysis of political activity.How might anger be defined and to what extent should it be understood as helpor hindrance in doing politics? Lyman outlines the importance of Westernconceptions of reason as opposite to emotion in establishing dominant andbureaucratic modes of politics, and perceptions of appropriate political behav-iour. Anger is the essential political emotion because it is a response to a perceivedinjustice. Listening to anger may lead to a constructive public dialogue about thefairness of political order; but order may be threatened when anger is repressedbecause its repression may lead to emotions and actions such as resentment, rageand violence. The threat that anger poses for political order means there arestrong cultural and political norms that seek to suppress the expression of anger;the danger of repression is that essential dialogues about injustice may besuppressed as well. These dialogues are important, according to Lyman, and showthat anger may also be a resource for politics. However, dominant groups seek todomesticate anger because of the threat it poses. This is done through force, moralrighteousness, care, silence and technique. What is of particular interest isLyman’s discussion of technique, that rational rule-following so central tomodern, bureaucratized life. Superficially technique may be represented as theantithesis of anger, yet he reminds us that Weber’s portrayal of the iron cage is astory of the domesticating of anger and other emotions in the service of order.The pursuit of instrumental rationality arose from anger at the whims of

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aristocratic power, but became an emotionally dissatisfying trap, especially for themiddle-class knowledge workers whose status is bound up in the negation ofemotion thought central to technique. The suppressed anxiety and anger of thesemiddle classes, Lyman argues, have been central in producing a political culturethat struggles to recognize and respect the importance of angry speech in address-ing injustice.

The problems of expressing anger within current political cultures are exploredmore specifically in the next two articles about cases of conflict. The authors hereconsider the politics of anger within the context of a hegemonic world order, inone case, and a particular non-democratic history in the other. Anger is discussedin relationship to ‘trauma’ and conflict resolution and in relation to politicalprotest within repressive regimes. People’s perceptions, negotiation and manage-ment of their emotions in relation to their political environment are examined,while the geo-political, economic and institutional frameworks of the specificpolitical situations covered are also considered.

Vanessa Pupavac’s article, ‘War on the Couch: The Emotionology of the NewInternational Security Paradigm’, introduces these themes with her exploration ofthe effects of an increasingly dominant Western therapeutic approach to violentconflict and its aftermath. She argues that, within the new security paradigm, theAnglo-American therapeutic approach to conflict has depoliticized anger. Indi-vidual emotional management has been seen as the key to international non-violentconflict resolution and is embedded within psychosocial trauma counsellingprogrammes. As a result of the focus on individual emotions, material deprivationis marginalized and socio-economic injustice ignored. The imposition of theWestern therapeutic approach is especially evident within the former Yugoslaviaand Bosnia in particular. International administration of the region is increasingthe local population’s sense of frustration and alienation from political processes.When international psychosocial programmes seem to fail to bring change, it is thepeople undergoing therapy who tend to be blamed, rather than the presumptionsof psychosocial programmes and their ethnocentric approach to understandingemotions. The consequence at the political level has been to question the fitness ofthe local populations for self-government because of supposed problems with angerand a general emotional dysfunctionalism. Reducing politics to an externallyimposed form of emotional management encourages dependence on the inter-veners and delegitimizes the right of the local populations to determine their ownaffairs. Western societies project their own therapeutic needs onto widely differingsocio-cultural situations and, by valorizing personal feelings, can discourage dividedcommunities from finding locally grounded and culturally appropriate ways ofmoving beyond enmity. Here, failing to listen to anger has meant a potentially cata-strophic lack of constructive dialogue.

Of course, dialogue is something valued as central to democratic principles,so what happens to anger within political systems where those principles are notrecognized? Helena Flam’s contribution deals with how anger cannot easily formpart of political protest within repressive regimes. She highlights many issues thatmight remain hidden in an examination of liberal democratic systems. Flam

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examines the contention that civil society was resurrected in Central Europe byprotest politics. However, unlike most previous literature, she focuses on thenewer forms of street protest, which, she argues, were based on fear, courage andhope. Though anger was important in these protests, its expression was danger-ous, considering the authorities often used force to dispel demonstrations. Appre-hension about the repression of mass rallies produced playful new forms ofprotest, which felt less fearful for those involved and aimed at diffusing aggres-sive official responses and making them look ridiculous. If anger at injustice isresponded to with force rather than discussion, this denies that dialogue ispossible and other means of seeking to address injustices need to be found. Suchan example is helpful because repressive regimes are not the only situation inwhich anger fails to bring about constructive dialogue.

Anger can be necessary or destructive within the more collective forms ofpolitics involved in social movement activity and identity politics more broadly.How people deal with anger may depend on the varying imagined identities ofthose acting together and their relationships to dominant social meaningssurrounding anger. The ability of certain ‘groups’ to effectively represent them-selves and their needs and interests may be either compromised or enhanced bythe ways in which they understand and respond to anger and by the type ofpolitical regime within which they must operate. Tensions are particularlyapparent between those who hold to individualized notions of anger and thosewho understand it in more collective terms. Such issues are discussed here withinthe context of anger in feminism. They are also discussed in relation to indigen-ous peoples’ challenges to the Eurocentrism of liberal democracy.

In this issue, Lane West-Newman argues that post-colonial societies have asocial and political life significantly coloured by the experience of anger producedthrough perceptions of ethnically located injustice, inequality and difference.Colonization and settlement as historical processes have produced sites whereethnic difference triggers frequent and significant negative emotional responses.There are indigenous grievances arising out of the processes of colonization,producing indigenous anger about the consequences of non-indigenous (white)settlement. There is also racism and resentment of any formal efforts made toaddress indigenous grievances, especially through legal channels. Together, thisconstitutes a social climate where ethnic difference is a salient force in inter-personal and political relationships. Legal attempts to redress imperial injusticesand work towards conciliation are often formulated within liberal frameworks ofindividual rights. Such frameworks may be unhelpful for indigenous peopleswhose own cultural frameworks may privilege a community, rather than individual responsibility, to ensure justice. The different cultural meaningsinforming settler and indigenous anger make accommodation difficult, butunderstanding those differences is important in seeing how they continue toconstruct post-colonial relationships.

The way in which anger constructs relationships is also explored in connec-tion with the second-wave feminist movement in my own article. The part angerplays in motivating political action is frequently noted, but less is said about ways

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in which anger continues to be a part of how people do politics. This articleassesses the usefulness of understanding anger as situated and relational, via acritique of a feeling rules approach to anger. Drawing loosely on Marxist notionsof conflict as the engine of social change, it endeavours to understand thegendered aspects of anger as they operate within feminist politics. Shifting setsof conventions have had some continuity in discouraging women in Westernnations (particularly white and middle-class women) from showing anger. Butclearly, women do get angry and feminists have drawn on anger in acting politi-cally. New Zealand feminist writings from the ‘second-wave’ are taken as illus-trative of the common difficulties Western feminists faced with their anger,because of the political ideal of sisterhood and the realities of dealing with otherwomen in often new and experimental political processes. Feminist strugglesdemonstrated that anger is not inevitably emancipatory, but is more likely to besubversive of entrenched patterns of dominance under conditions and relationsthat are at least oriented towards equality. If anger is taken up as a necessary partof conflicts, not as a chance for personalized slighting, then it can help emotion-ally and politically move people towards respectful relations with others that arekey to establishing social justice. This involves seeing anger as productive ofrelations with others rather than as a reaction to an enemy ‘other’.

However, in his article, David Ost argues that movement and party politics issuccessful when it convinces people to accept the enemy it proposes. Though thisis different from my own argument, I share Ost’s belief that emotions are ‘some-thing with which power is itself intimately involved’. Contributions to the specialissue do deal largely with oppositional politics, but all the authors do attend toresponses to and uses of anger among the powerful. Ost specifically looks at main-stream politics and how anger might be central. Citizens’ diverse experiences ofanger are something he suggests politicians direct for their own purposes, usuallyby attributing social problems to a particular enemy. In coming to thisconclusion, Ost is working with a different understanding of power than theFoucauldian-based one I propose in my article. My own analysis perhaps alsorelies on a rather optimistic belief in people’s ability to find forms of politics inwhich conflict is important but which can transcend the ‘us versus them’ mental-ity which Ost is no doubt right to perceive as a crucial feature of most currentpolitical activity.

This collection of articles is distinctive and important in its endeavour tounderstand the complexities of political activity. Socio-political life is funda-mentally shaped by, and shapes, anger as a key political emotion. In addressingsuch processes, these accounts offer a timely extension to the sociology ofemotions and a new approach to understanding politics. There has been wide-spread public response to events such as September 11 (see Kemper, 2002) andnationalized conflicts such as those in the Balkans, the Middle East and someAfrican states. This, combined with cynicism about politicians and the appear-ance of new protests (such as those against global capitalism), suggest shifts inpolitical culture that can be better understood by attending to anger. Fear mayappear to be the dominant emotional force in early twenty-first-century politics,

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as the ‘war on terror’ promotes fearfulness, rather than offering freedom fromit. In such a climate, anger becomes extremely important because while feararguably discourages action and divides people, anger can encourage communi-cation – even if it is initially somewhat hostile. However, anger is not intrinsi-cally just, and whether it offers salvation or disaster remains dependent on whenand how it occurs and the responses people make. A fuller knowledge of angerin politics is therefore crucial if politics is to be more than the pursuit of hostil-ity.

References

Aminzade, Ronald R., Goldstone, Jack A., McAdam, Doug, Perry, Elizabeth J., Sewell,William H., Jr, Tarrow, Sidney and Tilley, Charles (2001) Silence and Voice in the Studyof Contentious Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Barbalet, J.M. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory, and Social Structure: A MacrosociologicalApproach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bendelow, Gillian and Williams, Simon, eds (1998) Emotions in Social Life: CriticalThemes and Contemporary Issues. London: Routledge.

Berezin, Mabel (2002) ‘Secure States: Towards a Political Sociology of Emotion’, in JackBarbalet (ed.) Emotions and Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell/Sociological Review.

Braud, Philippe (1996) L’Emotion en politique: Problèmes d’analyse. Paris: Presses deSciences Politiques.

Craib, Ian (1994) The Importance of Disappointment. London: Routledge.Crossley, Nick (1995) ‘Body Techniques, Agency and Intercorporeality: On Goffman’s

Relations in Public’, Sociology 29(1): 133–49.Goodwin, Jeff, Jasper, James M. and Poletta, Francesca (2001) Passionate Politics: Emotions

and Social Movements. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Hochschild, Arlie R. (1983) The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling.

Berkeley: University of California Press.—— (1997) The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. New

York: Metropolitan Books.Hoggett, Paul (2000) Emotional Life and the Politics of Welfare. Basingstoke: Palgrave.Kemper, Theodore D. (2002) ‘Predicting Emotions in Groups: Some Lessons from

September 11’, in Jack Barbalet (ed.) Emotions and Sociology. Oxford: Blackwell/Socio-logical Review.

Lorde, Audre (1984) ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’, in Audre LordeSister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press.

Lupton, Deborah (1998) The Emotional Self. London: Sage.Lyman, Peter (1981) ‘The Politics of Anger’, Socialist Review 11: 55–74.Ross, Marc Howard and Rothman, Jay, eds (1999) Theory and Practice in Ethnic Conflict

Management: Theorizing Success and Failure. Basingstoke: Macmillan and New York:St Martin’s Press.

Seidler, Victor (1991) Recreating Sexual Politics: Men, Feminism and Politics. London:Routledge.

Spelman, Elizabeth V. (1989) ‘Anger and Insubordination’, in Ann Garry and MarilynPearsall (eds) Women, Knowledge and Reality: Explorations in Feminist Philosophy.London: Unwin Hyman.

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Stearns, Carol Zisowitz and Stearns, Peter N. (1986) Anger: The Struggle for EmotionalControl in America’s History. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Swaine, Lucas A. (1996) ‘Blameless, Constructive, and Political Anger’, Journal for theTheory of Social Behaviour 26: 257–74.

Zeldin, Theodore (1979) France 1848–1945: Politics and Anger. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.

■ Mary Holmes is a Sociology Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen. Herresearch into the political and cultural representation of gender engages with thesociology of the body, emotions, and intimacy and relationships. Her publishedarticles include discussions of the reproduction of gender within political cultures,and of time as a political resource. She has also co-edited Critical Concepts: TheBody (2003), a major work on the sociology of the body. Recently she was awardedan Economic and Social Research Council grant to investigate distance relation-ships, and work on this topic is due to appear in a forthcoming issue of CurrentSociology and The Sociological Review. Address: University of Aberdeen, AberdeenAB24 3QY, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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