Micciche, Laura R., Doing Emotion:

Micciche, Laura R., Doing Emotion: Rheoric, Writing, Teaching. Boynton/Cook: Portsmouth, NH.
2007.

“I argue that to best understand emotion’s role in binding the social body together (and tearing it apart), we need to grasp emotion as a category of analysis” (1).
“One of the problems associated with positioning emotion as a category of analysis is the tendency within intellectual as well as popular thought to collapse emotion with all things feminine, a marker that, at least in the history of academic discourse, has signaled a tendency to be weak, shallow, petty, vain, and narcissistic” (3).
“To say that an argument is ‘merely’ emotive is tantamount to saying it is not representative, but instead personal and idiosuyncratic; not thoughtful but solely reliant on opinion, which academics are more than ready to cast as suspicious, often with good reason (3).
“how we think about wht constitutes evidence and grounds for an argument—indeed, how we come to decide that an issue deserves to be ‘argued’—is already shaped by our emotional investments in how things ought to be” (3).
“emotion is always bound up with knowledge, what is thought rather than exclusively felt” (6).
“by demonstrating that emotion is part of what makes ideas adhere, generating investments and attachments that get recognized as position and/or perspectives, this study challenges longstanding views of emotion as unreasonable” (6).
“Binding emotion to the personal ignores emotion’s contribution to everyday acts of communication: it also seriously diminishes the place of emotion in rhetorical studies” (7).
“This definition holds that emotion is experienced between people within a particular context (and so resides both in people and in culture) and that emotion is an expression, experience , and perception mediated by language, body and culture” (8).
“Emotions for an economy of relations among people and within culture; they are produced by what Sara Ahmed calls “effects of circulation” (Ahmed 2003, 8) (12).
“emotions are a complex blend of at least three factors: first, a ‘person’s psychological past’; second, ‘the socially and culturally determined range of emotions and their characteristic behavioral and linguistic expressions’; and third, ‘a person’s constitutional inheritance, the set of genetically fixed threshold sensitivities and patterns of response’ (Rorty, 1980, 105)” (13).
“I use emotion as the key term, rather than feeling or affect, because it best evokes the potential to enact and construct, name and defile, become and undo—to perform meanings and to stand as a marker for meanings that get performed. These are rhetorical activities because they have to dowith consequences and effects, interpretation and judgment, change and movement” (14).
“By emphasizing categories of emotion as perceived rather than ontologically fixed states, Barrett’s work lends support to the idea that emotion is a rhetorical construct requiring a critical vocabulary to enable its rhetoricality to come into full view” (14).
“Blindness to emotion as a social concept may be attributed to what feminist theorists have long recognized as the feminization of emotion, a persistent historical and cultural (at least in the West) association of emotion with irrationality, manipulation, essence, and, of course, women—associations that have amounted to emotion’s subordinate status in knowledge-building and critical projects of all sorts (for critiques of this association, see Bartky 1990; Lutz 1990)” (16).
“Cvetkovich taps into the rhetorical function of emotion throughout her study; her emphasis on trauma as a part of everyday life, and so not reserved for describing catastrophic events, builds toward the idea that extreme often painful emotional experiences can become heightened sites from which to develop strategies of resistance operative within cultures and communities” (17).
“note that the ancients did not address emotion’s role in the invention process of formulating a position; instead, emotion is relegated to matters of arrangement or where to put an emotional appeal—and how to put it—to most effectively move an audience” (20).
“I am not talking about emotion as additive—which assumes that reason, logic, and rationality are normative, staple ingredients—but emotion as integral to communication, persuasion, attachments of all sorts, and to notions of self and other” (24).
“Narratives in general have the power to attach feeling to scripts of identity and belonging, a lesson I have come to understand more fully through family stories” (26). FOLKLORE
“emotion is dynamic and relational, taking form through collisions of contact between people as well as between people and the objects, narratives, beliefs, and so forth that we encounter in the world” (28).
“In fact, “Chris Gallagher (2005) argues that streamlining effect of disciplinarity—including the production of insiders and outsiders—causes what he calls “disciplinary guilt” among composintionists who ‘tend to think of our very mission as legitimizing and rendering audible the discourses of others, especially when they are marginalized’ (Gallagher 2005, 79)” (30).
“my goal is not to delegitimize that work but to ask what effects the emotional subjection expressed through identity metaphors have on compositionists’ political efficacy and intellectual work. The persistence of these metaphors, especially in arguments for institutional change, suggests that they have power to shift thinking and belief, to facilitate a new paradigm for composition. Yet, the conditions remain, as do the metaphors” (37).
Metaphors accrue a certain amount of stickiness through repetition and circulation, shaping constructions and perceptions of reality while creating affective spaces. They participate in a transference of affect that adheres (usually without our notice) through the force of repetition and regularity,” (38).
“These metaphors develop into what Wendy Brown (1995) calls wounded attachments, or attachments to loss, exclusion, and suffering that become entwined with politicized identity” (38).
“Thus, wonder and other emotional experiences may be considered teachable both outside and inside the classroom—a strange and perhaps counterintuitive idea, on that may even seem beside the point in the context of teaching writing” (48).
“An alternative framework for examining how meanings take form and circulate, performativity offers promising potential for critical study of the claim that ‘subjects do their emotions; emotions do not just happen to them’ (Zembylas 2003, 115)” (50).
“Performance studies examines the continually expanding range of behaviors invented by human beings to communicate with each other, especially those which are rehearsed, replayed, or consciously constructed” (50).
“Everyday performances of any sort—those constructing, for instance, identity, experience, or family history—are constituting acts in that they help to articulate who we are and how we live through crafted narratives and familiar plot-lines. They are also transformative acts capable of crafting new, whifting narratives that help us to live differently” (51).
“In assuming emotions are accessible exclusively through language, we fail to grapple with their performative and embodies aspects” (51).
Can we see performance of emotion in writing?
“Learning to see emotion as a usable resource, as grounds for doing rhetoric, is crucial if we are to trouble binaries that insist on planting reason on the side of decency and emotion on the side of shame” (67).