Protest as Critique

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 6 develops a discussion of the evaluative dimension of protest through an analysis of the political emotions expressed in protest acts. The first section of this chapter explains how emotions contain critical evaluations and I argue that emotional expressivity is crucial for social criticism. The rest of the chapter examines how the critical evaluations expressed in protest are grounded in political emotions and how the emotional expressivity of protest can be elaborated into critical discourses. The chapter draws from Alison Jaggar’s distinction between conventional emotions and outlaw emotions to shed light on the different evaluative attitudes and critical reactions to injustice of protesting publics. The chapter argues that, through linguistic elaboration, the critical evaluations contained in conventional and outlaw emotions lead to two different kinds of critical discourses: meliorative and radical forms of social criticism. The chapter elucidates the distinction between meliorative critique and radical critique through an analysis of queer activism and the critical discourses of the marriage equality movement, ACT UP, and Queer Nation. The guerrilla protest tactics of ACT UP illustrate well how, under conditions of communicative and epistemic injustice, when publics and institutions refuse to listen or are affectively and epistemically ill-equipped to listen properly, aggressive communicative action is needed to break social silences and actively resist insensitivity.