ÖZP 2010/2  S.141-155

Brigitte Bargetz, Birgit Sauer

Politics, Emotion and the Transformation of the Political. Critical Feminist Perspectives

Keywords: emotions, power, gender, transformation of the political

Starting from recent debates on politics and emotions as symptoms of current transformations of democracy, the article proposes a new conceptualisation of the relationship between politics and emotion. Through a critical approach, playing special attention to questions of gender and power, the article makes the politics/emotion dichotomy explicit as a specific historical constellation of domination. Furthermore, it examines how emotions can be made productive in the process of repolitization understood as emotional reconceptualization of politics. The article therefore proposes to grasp the tension between emotions as creative political practices and emotions as powerful political instruments in order to reformulate the concept of the political within the contemporary context of restructuring and transformation.