Affective Injustice and Responsibility for Emotion Regulation

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that the social norms that underlie our emotion regulation practices can result in further oppression of girls and women under conditions of patriarchy. One aspect of this oppression is the disproportionate responsibility for emotions that is taken on by girls and women in the wake of emotional distress caused by misogynistic aggression. I show that although emotion-regulation techniques are understood as ideal tools for enhancing agency and subjective well-being, and emotional labor is not necessarily oppressive, they may not only enable a perpetrator’s ability to evade accountability but also, by outsourcing emotional regulation, allow the perpetrator to fail to cultivate emotional intelligence, which leads to a vicious cycle. In these cases, girls and women also face a double bind. If certain emotion-regulation practices succeed in aligning emotions with dominant social norms, we face emotional labor that not only benefits the regulator but feeds the cycle described above, and we face alienation from our apt feelings. If we fail to regulate our emotions by accepted standards and patriarchal entitlements, we may be outcast, pathologized, or otherwise marginalized. I argue that the consequences of this double bind constitute a site of affective injustice and expose asymmetrical relations of moral accountability in evaluations of the fittingness of emotions.

Keywords

• emotion regulation
• moral responsibility
• oppression
• social norms
• affective injustice