Contenu du sommaire : Le genre des émotions

This article discusses the hypothesis of a distinct separation between “feminine” and “masculine” emotions as perceived in Antiquity, in order to shed light on the chronological process at work, from archaic Greece to imperial Rome, in the construction of both gender and the emotions. The study stresses the importance of social reactions toward emotions, of city life, and of public oratory in the (de)construction of the gendered aspects of emotions.

This article explores the extent to which emotions were an element in the construction of gender in the writings of medieval theologians. It will explain firstly that although sensitivity was often associated with women, it did not become an important element of the distinction between the sexes until the thirteenth century. The motif of feminine sensitivity was sometimes even used to serve a gender-egalitarian reading of certain biblical passages, by considering femininity to be a constituent part of any human being. It will then focus in particular on a single emotion, namely verecundia (shame), which is often linked to the veil and therefore to the women who took it. This will make it possible to demonstrate how an “emotion” regularly attributed to men could also be construed as specifically feminine – as a symbol of the demure behaviour and submission that was expected of women, who had to accept the masculine mediation epitomized by the veil. At the same time, verecundia also opened a path to salvation and even to glory for women. Verecundia thus appeared to women as a path to glory through shame, which was defined both as an emotion and as a virtue.

Although scholars have begun to explore the emotions of early Protestant groups, including those of the Puritans, they have not considered whether there might be differences in the emotions expressed and felt by Puritan men and women. This paper analyzes a set of confessions recorded for the period 1648-1649 by Thomas Shepard, who led the Puritan church of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three different approaches are employed. The first considers “basic emotions,” the second examines the emotions considered as such by the Puritans themselves, and the third observes the emotions in the context of their “practice”– that is, in the context of habitual behavior. It concludes that there were indeed some gender differences in the emotional lives of these Cambridge women and men.

‪This article considers the question of emotions during the revolutionary years 1790-1795. When faced with new desires on the part of women, men constantly called them to order. Women were rapidly bidden to remain in their place as wives and mothers, and to maintain their supposed attitude of gentleness and decorum so that it would be made manifest in the home. At best, they were to pass on love of the ‪‪patrie ‪‪to their children, and a longing for heroism to their sons. The prospect, followed by the experience of a disturbance in the old order of affect and place, might lead to desperation in men. In order to prevent the re-emergence of furies and female warriors, it was expected of men that they should be capable of restraining women's drives, of binding them together in the same attitude of gentleness and decorum. We can say then that feelings have a gender, or can be seen as disreputable, symptoms of the differentiated political expectations as between men and women, rich and poor, the educated and the barely literate. They are symptoms too of the dissonance between prescription, demands from below, and the emotional real-life experience of everyone, man or woman, in a context where the possible had been opened up in every way.‪

During the First World War, the millions of letters exchanged between mobilized French soldiers and their spouses enable us to observe at close quarters their conjugal relations: in the circumstances of the time, relationships within couples might be created, transformed, or come to an end. These letters are key primary sources for investigating the role of emotions in the forging of new relationships maintained at a distance. This article explores the gender of the feelings expressed in these distant relationships, and is guided by three principal aims : to enquire whether men's and women's emotions were expressed similarly or differently; to estimate the degree to which the war – a challenge to the love between separated couples – perturbed the expression of feelings or on the contrary reinvented them; and lastly to understand how feelings, whether expressed or silenced in epistolary relationships, contributed to the redistribution of the gender roles imposed from the very beginning of the war.

In medieval Arabic literature, there is a specific way of dying of passionate love, linked to the conception of a chaste love that has its own values and can be expressed only within the limits of its own rules. This article studies the verses recited by the lovers before venting their last breath, to be found in twenty stories from the ‪ ‪al-W‪ ‪āḍ‪ ‪i‪ ‪ḥ‪ ‪ al-mub‪ ‪ī‪ ‪n f‪ ‪ī‪ ‪ ‪ ‪ḏ‪ ‪ikr man ustu‪ ‪š‪ ‪hida min al-mu‪ ‪ḥ‪ ‪ibb‪ ‪ī‪ ‪n‪ ‪ (or ‪ ‪Handbook of the Martyrs of Love‪ ‪ ) by Mughul‪ ‪ṭā‪ ‪y (d. 1361). By analysing the situations in which these verses are spoken, I have tried to understand whether there exists (or not) a specifically feminine way of expressing emotion before dying.‪

‪In the years around 1100, for young noblewomen educated in monasteries, the composition of love letters addressed to their teacher of rhetoric constituted an apprenticeship both literary and emotional. As Barbara Newman has shown in a recent study, the ‪‪Epistolae duorum amantium‪‪, exchanged by Heloise and Peter Abelard during their affair should be understood in the light of this ‪‪practice. Their singularity is chiefly explained by the fact that Heloise took the decision to make flesh a poetic fiction, identifying herself with tragic heroines found in Ovid.‪

‪This article investigates the connection between gender and the emotions by analysing a corpus of about one hundred articles, published in the first columns entirely dedicated to “the woman question” in Sudanese newspapers between 1950 and 1956, the period immediately before Sudan's independence (1956). In these columns, the authors, both male and female, sought to draw a picture of the “new woman”, “modern and happy”, and contrasted her with the “backward” woman, trapped in “obsolete customs”. These portraits contain more or less veiled suggestions about the emotional order that the “modern Sudanese woman” should adopt. This article aims to trace the genealogy of these gendered emotional orders and of the contradictory narrative strategies deployed in these articles in order to “move” the reading public.‪

The document analysed here is the account of a miracle (attributed to Wulfstan) collected in about 1240 and describing the reactions of both parents, father and mother, on the death of a three-year-old child in Worcester, England, in c. 1220. It reveals the expression of certain emotions considered to be more masculine and others seen as more feminine. But in fact, the pain and suffering manifested by tears, lamentations and cries are widely shared by both parents, even if the father tries to hide more of his distress and to comfort his wife. Their neighbours also weep abundant tears, out of compassion. The pain is so acute that both father and mother end up distraught, “almost mad”, in a parental form of insanity that creates emotional disorder and gender confusion, since this madness virilizes the mother and feminizes the father.

Drawing on both prescriptive sources and private documents, this article explores how well-to-do women occupied urban space at the beginning of the early modern period: it was a matter of negotiating their potential mobility. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, social control over women increased. Their movements within the urban space were precisely codified, assigning them primarily to domestic space, imagined as the site of virtue, work and protection – although in reality it was a place where exchange and circulation took place. Public space on the other hand was increasingly masculinized. Although women were closely monitored by theologians, pastors and public authorities, at least some of them were able to adapt to these limitations and undertake long journeys, out of necessity, thus demonstrating the gap between norms and everyday practice.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the French army saw itself as a national institution with the task of passing on to conscripts the values of the “military-virile model”. But did soldiers always retain this “lesson in virility”? Asking the question means exploring the different ways in which this model might be received, drawing on some of the methodological principles raised by gender studies. Before being a heightened representation of masculinity, the military-virile model is a gender category reflecting a power relationship, whether it is concerned to justify military obedience or more generally masculine, racial or social domination. This model cannot therefore be considered as a blanket representation passed on to the whole population of servicemen, but rather as the always individual product of a power relationship aiming to make certain forms of domination seem natural, and to arouse a desire for identification.