books
statistical panic cultural politics and poetics of the emotions
in this moving and thoughtful book kathleen woodward explores the politics and poetics of the emotions focusing on american culture since the 1960s . she argues that we are constrained in terms of gender race and age by our cultures scripts for emotional behavior and that the accelerating impoverishment of interiority is a symptom of our increasingly media saturated culture . she also shows how we can be empowered by stories that express our experience revealing the value of our emotions as a crucial form of intelligence . p referring discreetly to her own experience woodward examines the interpenetration of social structures and subjectivity considering how psychological emotions are social phenomena with feminist anger racial shame old age depression and sympathy for non human cyborgs including robots as key cases in point . she discusses how emerging institutional and discursive structures engender new affects that in turn can help us understand our changing world if we are attentive to them the statistical panic produced by the risk society with its numerical portents of disease and mortality ; the rage prompted by impenetrable and bloated bureaucracies ; the brutal shame experienced by those caught in the crossfire of the media ; and the conservative compassion that is not an emotion at all only an empty political slogan . p the orbit of statistical panic is wide drawing in feminist theory critical phenomenology and recent theories of the emotions . but at its heart are stories . as an antidote to the vacuous dramas of media culture with its mock emotions and scattershot sensations woodward turns to the autobiographical narrative . stories of illness by joan didion yvonne rainer paul monette and alice wexler among others receive special attention with the inexhaustible emotion of grief framing the book as a whole .
hardcover duke university press 2009 isbn13 9780822343547 isbn10 0822343541
abridged n isbn 13 9780822343547 number in series 1 number of pages 316 publisher duke univ pr release date 62135769600000