Emotional Work In Animal Rights Activism
While participation in the animal protection movement can impart a deep sense of purpose it can also involve navigating a host of emotions on a near-daily basis. Interviews with Swedish animal protection advocates uncovered five such types of “emotion work” as the authors dub it, including: suppressing negative emotions at times; venting these emotions at other times; generating the emotional energy needed to maintain cohesion in a group; using graphic imagery to maintain a commitment to the cause; and harnessing feelings of guilt. It is important for advocates to recognize these emotional costs and look to self care when needed. This will not only strengthen the individual but the movement as a whole.
[Abstract excerpted from original source.]
“Social movement activism requires emotional motivation and entails emotional costs, and, because of this, activists tend to be deeply involved in the management of emotions – or emotion work – and not just in connection with protest events, but also on an everyday basis. Based on a case study of animal rights activism in Sweden, this article identifies five types of emotion work that animal rights activists typically perform: containing, ventilation, ritualization, micro-shocking and normalization of guilt. The emotion work performed by activists, it is argued, is best understood from a moral-sociological perspective building on Durkheim’s sociology of morality, based on which the article then outlines key elements of a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of emotion work in social movements.”
http://asj.sagepub.com/content/56/1/55.abstract