å Sunday, December 3rd, 2017

We all have emotions and Sarah Ahmed in the article “Affective Economies” discusses how these emotions affects us as people and individuals. She examines how different emotions and feelings occur and how they make us do or think different things that sometimes can lead to unpleasant conclusion. On the other hand, good feelings and emotions can lead to resolution of some problems we face every day. Although, Sara Ahmed begins her article with a description of how the emotion of “hate” occurs towards people who are different. She says that hatred occurs not because someone thinks that the other one is different but because it threatens one’s stability in life. We as readers understand that Ahmed is making a parallel to a modern day problem in society of a certain country. She adds that these emotions lead to loathing and it becomes unstoppable because after a certain point this conviction that someone is bad cannot be changed.

Ahmed talks about immigrants also, she discusses that white people fell a certain negative emotion because immigrants come to their country and they take away their jobs and threaten their “purity” in a way. However, from the immigrants stand point, they probably don’t share “white people” opinion because they have their own problems to solve and threatening people is not in their agenda. Ahmed then goes to discuss the feeling of fear and that it always leads to some thoughtless actions. Thus, different emotions can make one’s life either better or worse. And, we as people are driven by emotions every single day. Our feelings and beliefs make us  create examples of caricatures of what is considered bad or good. So, we create images of a bad immigrant or a dangerous convict. It’s all in our head and it is hard to think logically and not be driven by emotions.

Sara Ahmed discusses in her article “Affective Economies,” her own explanation to emotions and how people create them. She also discusses how the littlest outside factors can effect ones emotions about something. She begins by stating different examples of “hate” that are common in the United States like a white man scowling at a mixed race couple or a farmer furious that the government loans billions of dollars to foreigners when he can’t get a loan to save his farm and she names this love. This gives a perfect example of what she explains in her article, which is that hate is not really hate. The hate is not based on the subject but it comes from within the person that expresses it. That because they love something so much, whatever interferes with what they love they express anger towards them. This anger can be effected by other smaller problems that build up to hate and soon enough anyone that even comes close to what they hate for example being the same race, having similar looks, religion, or even names become a part of it. Sara Ahmed tells that hate is made from within the person and move outwards onto people, things, places, or anything. She similarly addressed her explanation to fear. Fear is not actually being afraid of something but it is a way of avoiding something much bigger that the person themselves might not really notice. Fear of a certain object is supposed to be the symptom of what you actually fear. For example she includes that Hans had a fear of horses which is actually replacing his fear of castration (125). For the fears replacing the real fear can be managed but is kept because their real fear can’t be managed. Ahmed argues that emotions are all within ourselves and the subject of our emotions is not the problem but only the victim.

Sara Ahmed discusses emotion and its significance to human connection in her article, “Affective Economics”. When analyzing the concept of hate and love, Ahmed shows how much of the tension and political uproar we see in America today against migrants, is not necessarily due to hatred. She says how hatred is never the core emotion, but that it is concocted thru feelings of endangerment for the things we love. When it comes to migrants, white nationalists don’t hate them for who they are, but hate how the things they love (their idea of a perfect nation, jobs, and society) feel threatened. It almost seems that hatred is a key effect of fear of change. Ahmed discusses how this is a significant problem among many white people and their collective passionate hate against threats to nationalistic ideas. Many share a strong love for their society, nation, and shared whiteness, and any intimidations to such cause combined chaos amongst them. Ahmed also notes how many people don’t have significant rights against accusations associated with this hatred. For example, many can be accused of terrorism and detained even if their connection to terrorist groups are very weak (like similarity in names, race or residences) with no real rights to fight against such detainment without prominent cause. I think Ahmed is trying to note how these false accusations and detainments are in a large way the effects of irrational hatred. She also explains how people concoct impressions of entire racial groups, for example middle eastern people are painted as terrorists; and how this can cause unnecessary fear on all sides of the equation. When discussing “grounds” Ahmed notes how unsupported racist evidence such as a person being middle eastern with a similar name to a terrorist could very well be the grounds for detainment today and how this is unacceptable.

Alfie Corteza

Professor Bullock

Assignment #13

In Sara Ahmed’s article, “Affective Economies,” she explains that the people who have a hatred aren’t necessarily hating others due to a specific cause, preferably they have a significant love for something and do not want that thing to be affected and decline in quality. Also, her referral to the individual’s feelings in regards to a person, place or thing is not necessarily a start or end point, but instead it is a flow in a demographic of some social economy.
For anxiety, there could be a large body of people or things to make one fear for a specific group. An example would be in regards to the refugee crisis, and a politician’s use of words on the matter. The methods of particular terms, and words that convey a specific mindset when it comes to displaying an image. An example would be the former leader of the British Conservative club who used particularly anxious and worrying terms when it came to accepting asylum refugees into the country. Also, Sara also points out specific terms are supposedly used to differ between bogus, and genuine asylum seekers, however, how can one differentiate the two? She also compares the refugee example to an individual who I in prison for killing a 16-year-old burglar trying to burgle his home. Here they made the individual who is defending himself the criminal, and the burglar a victim rather than the other way around. Ahmed compares the asylum seekers to the burglar, and the murderer to the body of people, and the house as the countries’ values, and that the asylum seekers are trying to take it away from the rightful owners. Thus the wording can change the image of an individual of that is rightfully guilty as a victim, and the innocent as the criminal, such as the improper imprisonment of the one who was defending his home.