Economies of Empathy: Obama, Neoliberalism, and Social Justice

Abstract

This paper asks how we might theorise the politics of empathy in a context in which visions of social justice premised on empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal frameworks. Through reading the ambivalent grammar of President Obama's emotional rhetoric, I examine how it resonates in different ways both with feminist and antiracist debates about empathy and social justice and with the neoliberal discourse of the ‘empathy economy’ expressed within popular business literatures. I argue that, in framing empathy as a competency to be developed by individuals alongside imperatives to become more risk-taking and self-enterprising, Obama's rhetoric reveals its centrist neoliberal underpinnings and risks (re)producing social and geopolitical exclusions and hierarchies. Yet, I suggest that seeing the phenomenon of ‘Obama-mania’ as produced not only within discourses of neoliberal governmentality but also through more radical intersections of empathy, hope, and imagination illustrates how empathy might be conceptualised as an affective portal to different spaces and times of social justice.

Affecting feminism: Questions of feeling in feminist theory

“…In Pedwell's discussion of discourses of affective (self)-transformation in international development literatures, she argues that, through conceptualising face-to-face encounters between development professionals and 'poor people' in 'developing' contexts as offering access to 'felt truth', development discourses risk severing empathy from both processes of imagination and structural relations of power. For both Whitehead and Pedwell, then, emotions are conceptualised most productively 'not as affective lenses on ''truth'' or ''reality'', but rather as one important (embodied) circuit through which power is felt, imagined, mediated, negotiated and/or contested' (Pedwell, 2012b). From Hemmings' perspective, current framings of empathy remain 'inadequate to [the] task of developing an affective solidarity' in feminist praxis because they continue to privilege 'ontology over and above the negotiation of the relationship between ontology and epistemology ' (2012: 152).…”

Solidarity as Resistance: Feminist Administrators in U.S. Academia

“…The affect resulting from experiences of discrimination, inequity, or marginalization is an important point of departure but does not equal solidarity. Moreover, “feminist solidarity should not be forged on the basis of ‘shared victimhood’” (Steans 2007:237), nor should it be rooted solely in empathy because those who have social privilege can leverage empathy to perpetuate axes of oppression (Pedwell 2012b). In fact, Pedwell (2012a:283) explains that “when subjects assume that they can feel what another feels in ways that fail to take account of differences in history, power, and experience” their empathy reproduces and reifies those very differences.…”

Between existential mobility and intimacy 5.0: translocal care in pandemic times

“…A worried person may not only be highly susceptible to scams, but also legitimate promotions of health, insurance, ‘prepping’ or finance products, as well as ideological manipulation when micro-targetted on the basis of analytics of their emotional states. This turn to empathy is anything but empathetic ( Hunt, 2018 ; Pedwell, 2012 ) and it is not an unintended consequence. In fact, it is the opposite, as people’s vulnerabilities are deliberately being taken advantage of for profit.…”