Suchergebnisse

This article brings feminist literature on anxiety and wellness to bear on the responsibilities of mothers as they are represented in a series of popular editorial publications. It seeks to deepen the interdisciplinary dialogue between these theories of affect and theories of care work by examining how popular representations of maternal responsibility reflect a contemporary "affect of motherhood" and indicate specifically that mothers might be "coming undone" under the weight of a shared, political anxiety that they are encouraged to feel individually. It is argued that the newly complex and competing labours of mothers, and mothers' complicity in and resistance to these labours, can only be understood in the context of public anxiety. It asks what is at stake for the most disenfranchised women when it comes to recognizing and resisting today's intensified forms of maternal responsibility.

The study of time in personal perceptions and social lives is hardly a new enterprise. A rather large body of literature on these subjects exists, and much of the material is utterly fascinating. People have examined orientations to the past, present, and future, the tempi of living, cycles, biological and social rhythms, the meaning of expectation, and of course memory. One of the more popular areas of research involves categorizing people as past, present, or futureoriented. These so-called temporal orientations are associated with various personality traits, as for example the heightened past orientations of anxious people, or the characteristic future orientations of highly achieving people. It has also been common practice to label according to various social classes within a society: the poor, present-oriented; the middle class, futureoriented; and the affluent, past- or, more precisely, tradition-oriented.

In this article, we present an analysis of how communities of maternal feeling are configured by users on the discussion boards of Mumsnet, a popular British online parenting forum. A search was conducted to find threads with the phrase 'I feel' in the title. The first 100 threads in the search results using this term that referred to emotions - almost all of which articulated negative feelings - were then analysed. We argue that forums like Mumsnet provide an important anonymous space where women can talk openly about emotions. In doing so, feeling rules related to 'good motherhood' are established and reproduced. Members of Mumsnet tolerate some expression of feelings such as ambivalence, resentment, anxiety and anger and often provide empathy and friendly support in response. However, the expression of negative maternal feeling is tolerated only to a certain degree. Those posters who go beyond this boundary are positioned as exceeding the norm and requiring professional help. Forums such as Mumsnet often serve to support rather than challenge the political status quo in their emphasis on self-responsibility, personal choice and therapeutic solutions to what are positioned as private problems.

Abstract
What does it mean to speak of a society being nervous, a demos angry, a polity depressed or a population exhausted? Are these merely frothy terms of journalistic description or can such moods be captured in meaningful ways? This article responds to two tendencies: the dismissal of mood as affective blur and claims to represent mood through scales of empirical measurement. The argument presented here is that mood is a definable phenomenon, relating to perceptual confusion between objectivity and subjectivity; diffuse affective sources and cumulative sensations rather than temporally containable events. To speak of the mood of a social situation is to acknowledge this ambiguous juncture between subjective determination and objective constraint. More like background feelings that persists over time, moods frame not only immediate situational experience but scope for future thought and action. In this sense, moods frame political agency. This framing is primarily intuitive rather than conventionally cognitive.This article explores one method for capturing the ways in which mood shapes agency. In interview-based mood stories, interviewees are invited to focus upon how the mood affect them as political actors. Mood stories are neither traditional representational narratives nor simple impressionistic portraits of feelings, but accounts of how people find meaningful ways of constituting their own experience. Mood stories aim to get at the intuitive work involved in forming political experience. The empirical context for the mood stories examined here are 42 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with British citizens aged between 18 and 80 with a view to understanding how Brexit made them feel.

AbstractTheories of nations and nationalism have serious problems when dealing with the concept of charisma. Besides frequent conceptual confusion, the concept of charisma is predominantly observed from either the structuralist position or the perspective of psychological reductionism. Charisma is so often sought in the properties of an office, within an ideology, character of a leader or general socio‐economic circumstances of an epoch. In the example of the commonly examined case—that of Hitler—this article argues that charisma is a property of experience and it is the emotional reaction of the audience that validates it. This article builds on Erika Fischer‐Lichte's theory of performance to argue that successful performances of charisma create a type of community that is not based solely on common beliefs but more importantly on shared emotions and experiences. Studying charisma as a property of experience is a step toward understanding the emotional character of nationalism itself.

Theories of nations and nationalism have serious problems when dealing with the concept of charisma. Besides frequent conceptual confusion, the concept of charisma is predominantly observed from either the structuralist position or the perspective of psychological reductionism. Charisma is so often sought in the properties of an office; within an ideology; character of a leader; or general socio-economic circumstances of an epoch. In the example of the commonly examined case – that of Hitler – this article argues that charisma is a property of experience and it is the emotional reaction of the audience that validates it. This article builds on Erika Fischer-Lichte's theory of performance to argue that successful performances of charisma create a type of community that is not based solely on common beliefs, but more importantly on shared emotions and experiences. Studying charisma as a property of experience is a step towards understanding the emotional character of nationalism itself