Des « mouvements émotionnels » à la mobilisation des émotions

Abstract

The development of victim activism provided an opportunity to study the role of emotions in collective action ­ a recent field of research on social movements. Indeed, sociologists as Walgrave and Verlhust characterize victims movements as “new emotional movements” for which they consider the affective variables predominant in participation. However the “emotionality” attributed to victim activism should not be viewed as an inherent property of this type of movement, but as a “folk construct”. Thus, the attribution of emotions is a common form of disqualification, in both the public as well as the judicial arena. Victim groups are thus stigmatized as “irrational” movements based on a sense of mourning, a desire for revenge or a traumatic shock rather than reasoned claims. This is why many victim spokespersons try to repress the public expression of their emotions. A fruitful direction is to leave aside the study of mobilizing emotions and to emphasize the analysis of mobilized emotions. The victims’ movements are perhaps distinctive less because of their (“emotional”) motives than because of the affective role they play in public and of the emotional work to which they are obligated by the cultural expectations attached to the social victim’s role.

Keywords

• victim movements
• mourning
• emotions
• social movements
• commemoration