Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2012, volume 30, pages 280 ^ 297

doi:10.1068/d22710

Economies of empathy: Obama, neoliberalism, and social

justice
Carolyn Pedwell
School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University, Room 2.82, Second floor, Armstrong
Building, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, England; e-mail: carolyn.pedwell@ncl.ac.uk
Received 3 December 2010; in revised form 2 June 2011

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.
Keywords: affect, empathy, hope, imagination, neoliberalism, Obama, social justice

1 Introduction
In The Audacity of Hope President Barack Obama argues that the United States is
suffering the effects of an `empathy deficit'. Cultivating ``a stronger sense of empathy'',
he insists, would ``tilt the balance of our current politics in favour of those people who
are struggling in this society'' (2006a, pages 67 ^ 68). This link between empathy and
social justice has been long discussed within feminist and antiracist social theory (see
Boler, 1999; Chabot Davis, 2004; Hill Collins, 1991; Meyers, 1994; Nussbaum, 2003;
Pedwell, 2007; 2010; 2012). For example, Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade
Mohanty argue that in a contemporary world order structured by transnational capital
``engagement based on empathy'' is integral to processes of fostering ``social justice''
and ``building solidarity across otherwise debilitating social, economic and psychic
boundaries'' (1997, page xlii). Scholars of international relations contend, furthermore,
that within the context of long-term political conflict, violence, and trauma the creation
of empathy and compassion ``may facilitate more lasting and ingenuous forms for social
healing and reconciliation'' (Hutchinson and Bleiker, 2008, page 385). Similarly, within
childhood education, empathy has been conceptualised as an affective skill crucial to
the development of ``caring, peaceful and civil societies'' (Roots of Empathy, 2009).
As the examples above attest, empathy is now everywhere and is viewed, by
definition, as positive. Understood in shorthand as the ability to `put oneself in the
other's shoes', empathy is, according to these narratives, what `we' want to cultivate in
ourselves and others. It is the affective attribute that we want to define `our' society and
which we hope will characterise our interactions with those living outside our borders.
When empathy is lacking or deficient we need to nurture it. Where there is oppression
or violence empathy can heal. Indeed, within the contemporary Western sociopolitical
sphere, empathy is framed as `solution' to a wide range of social ills and as a central
component of building cross-cultural and transnational social justice. As such, however,

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empathy can, like happiness (Ahmed, 2010), become a kind of end point. Precisely
because it is so widely and unquestioningly viewed as `good', its naming can represent a
conceptual stoppage in conversation or analysis. Thus, the most pressing questions tend
to be less `what is empathy?', `what does it do?', or `what are its risks?' but, rather, the
more automatic refrain of `how can we cultivate it?' And yet, despite the potentially
stultifying extent to which empathy is taken for granted, there remains something
powerful about it, a sense that it carries some enduring promise or force which we
cannot quite pin down but do not want to dismiss or give up on. The very fact that
empathy is so widely linked with visions of social justice and transformation signals a
need to examine the nature of this intertwinement in further critical depth. In this paper
I seek to address some of the questions posed above by examining how, and with what
critical implications, empathy is differentially felt, constructed, and mobilised across a
range of key sites where issues of social justice and affective politics are at stake from
Obama's political memoirs and speeches to best-selling business books, to feminist,
antiracist, and queer theory
As such, this paper seeks to build on the work of feminist cultural theorists, such as
Sara Ahmed (2004; 2010), who have explored the `ambivalent grammar' of emotions
(see also Berlant, 2004; Boler, 1999; Hemmings, 2011; Ngai, 2005; Spelman, 1997;
Woodward, 2004). Part of my aim is to tease out some of the different ways in which
empathy has been defined and theorised in feminist and antiracist literatures and the
implications of these conceptualisations as they `travel' within and across different sites
of political significance. In particular, I ask how we might theorise the politics of
empathy in a context in which visions of community and social justice premised on
empathetic engagement need to be situated within prevailing neoliberal discursive,
political, and economic frameworks. In theorising neoliberalism, I draw primarily on
the work of Aihwa Ong (2006), who describes neoliberalism as involving processes
whereby market-oriented logics come to order and refigure modes of political governance and citizenship. Of course, there is no one or all-encompassing `neoliberalism'. Ong
and other theorists have stressed the importance of scholarly attention to the specific
contexts in which neoliberalisms operate and to the ways in which neoliberal forms of
governmentality frequently adapt and transform their boundaries as a means to differentially produce and regulate subjects and populations (see also Grewal, 2005; Rose,
2006). As such, it is important to clarify that I seek to offer a critical reading of how
discourses of neoliberalism in the context of the United Statesand the network of
transnational links which fragment and exceed its borderscondition and shape shifting
understandings of empathy.(1) Within this analysis `America' is understood as both ``an
imperialist nation-state'' and a ``discourse of neoliberalism'' itself (Grewal, 2005, page 2).
President Obama's political memoirs and speeches are a primary site for my
analysis. As the first African-American president of the United States and the political
`underdog' who made the previously `unimaginable' a reality, Obama has been the
locus of a phenomenal well of affective energy and attention both within America
and internationally (see Coleman and Ferreday, 2010; Zizek, 2009). Through reading
the ambivalence of Obama's emotional engagement, in this paper I seek to illustrate
how his political rhetoric resonates (in different ways) both with feminist and antiracist
(1) The term `neoliberalism', first used by Thatcherites to describe a return to 19th-century freetrade regimes (Melamed, 2006, page 14), tends not to get used within the United States, where the
terms `market-based policies' and `neoconservatism' are more commonly used to ``encode the
ensemble of thinking and strategies seeking to eliminate social programs and promote the interests
of big capital'' (Ong, 2006, pages 1 ^ 2). In employing the term `neoliberal' to situate President
Obama's politics, however, I seek both to distinguish his administration's discourse from Republican
rhetorics and to indicate where they overlap.

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debates about empathy and social justice and the neoliberal discourse of the `empathy
economy' expressed within popular business literatures (Nussbaum, 2005; Patnaik with
Mortensen, 2009). On the one hand, as I suggest in section 2, in urging Americans to
develop more empathetic attitudes to those who are less privileged than themselves,
both within and outside the borders of the nation, Obama employs a language of
`mutuality', `debt', and `obligation' which seems to echo feminist and antiracist concerns
regarding empathy, privilege, and social justice. On the other hand, as I argue in
section 3, in framing empathy as a competency which should be developed by individuals alongside imperatives to become more risk-taking and self-enterprising, Obama's
political rhetoric reveals its centrist neoliberal underpinnings in ways that risk (re)producing social and political exclusions and hierarchies. Yet, in section 4 of this paper,
I turn to writing on `Black radical imagination' (Kelley, 2002) and `queer futurity'
(Munoz, 2009) to suggest that the phenomenon of `Obama-mania' may contain the
seeds for alternative ways of thinking through the politics of empathy. I argue that
reading Obama-mania and its aftermath 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
2 Affective connections: critical theory, empathy, and social justice
Within feminist and antiracist theory the achievement of cross-cultural and transnational social justice has been linked in part with the development of empathy. For
example, Diane Teitjens Meyers suggests that through opening up ``channels of communication and understanding'' (1994, page 9), empathy can help to ``mediate relations
between so-called different individuals and members of dominant social groups''
(page 37). From Kimberly Chabot Davis's perspective, ``in the context of an alarming
international rise in hate groups and terrorism, left-oriented scholars cannot afford to
give up empathy's promise for fostering cross-cultural understanding and desires for
social justice and equality'' (2004, page 406; see also Alexander and Mohanty, 1997;
Koehn, 1998; Nussbaum, 2003). Although empathy is defined differently across these
literatures, it is generally understood as similar to other `humanising' emotions such as
sympathy and compassion in denoting an orientation of care or concern towards
others. Yet, empathy is also distinguished from these feelings on the basis of its
stronger element of identification or `perspective-taking'that is, the process of
``imaginatively experiencing the feelings, thoughts and situations of another'' which it
entails (page 403). This process of perspective-taking is, in turn, conceived as an
important ingredient of affirmative social transformation, which recognises and
respects the subjectivity and agency of others and interrogates oppressive hierarchies
of power across geopolitical boundaries.
Because of the emotional charge it carries, empathy, however, is seen to involve
more than simply a process of imaginative reconstruction. Indeed, it is the radically
`unsettling' affective experience of empathy that is conceived as potentially generative
of both personal change and social change (LaCapra, 2001; see also Bartky, 1996;
Chabot Davis, 2004). Through establishing empathetic identification with those who
are positioned differently to themselves, (privileged) subjects may experience a radical
transformation in consciousness which leads them not only to respond to the experience
of `the other' with greater understanding and compassion but also to recognise their
own complicity within transnational hierarchies of power. For example, Chabot Davis
argues in her analysis of African-American literature and `the politics of cross-racial
empathy' that

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``Empathetic experiences of seeing from the vantage point of another can lead to
a recognition of that person's subjecthood and agency and can lead the white
empathizer to not only become critically aware of racial hierarchy, but to desire
to work against the structures of inequality wherein her own power resides'' (2004,
page 405).
Stressing the recognition of complicity that cross-cultural and transnational
empathy must entail, Megan Boler (1999) similarly envisions an approach to empathetic engagement which ``radically shifts [one's] self-reflexive understandings of power
relations'' (page 157) and enables one to ``recognize oneself as implicated in the social
forces that create the climate of obstacles the other must confront'' (page 166). In these
and other feminist and antiracist texts the suggestion is that while `we' might theorise
social inequalities and commit ourselves to political responsibilities and obligations in
the abstract, a transformation at the affective level is required to make `us' actually
`feel', realise, and act on such responsibilties and obligations.
However, feminist and antiracist theorists also discuss the significant limits and
risks of figuring empathy as a progressive political resource. For example, theorists
underscore that claims to `know' or represent the experiences of `others' through
empathy may involve forms of projection and appropriation on the part of `privileged
subjects' which can reify existing social hierarchies and silence `marginal subjects'
(Spelman, 1997; see also Ahmed, 2004; Bartky, 1996; Engle and Khanna, 1997; Pedwell,
2007; 2010; 2012). As Ahmed argues, ``empathy sustains that very difference that it may
seek to overcome'' when subjects assume that they can feel what another feels in ways
that fail to take account of differences in history, power, and experience (2004,
page 29). Moreover, empathy, as Clare Hemmings (2011) points out, is not boundless
but, rather, always has a limit, through which distinctions between subjects are inevitably redrawn. Further concerns address whether empathetic engagement across social
and geopolitical boundaries can be mutual and dialogical or whether empathy is more
likely to remain the purview of those who are already socially privileged (Bartky, 1996;
Koehn, 1998). From this perspective in discourses of cross-cultural or transnational
empathy it is important to ask who is being compelled to empathise and who is being
empathised with, and whether such discourses risk reifying categories of `empathiser'
and `sufferer', which reproduce, rather than contest, dominant geopolitical relations of
power (Gunew, 2009; Hemmings, 2011; Pedwell, 2010; 2012). The fluid and unpredictable quality of emotion also underscores the risks of figuring empathy as a stable or
abiding resource for mobilising movements for social justice.
As the points above imply, feminist and antiracist debates regarding empathy's
political promise have been premised on quite different visions of what empathy
is and what it does. We might identify two key (although not mutually exclusive)
conceptualisations operating within these literatures. Firstly, there are theorists who
figure empathy primarily as a capacity, skill, or tool (Boler, 1999; Chabot Davis, 2004;
Meyers, 1994; Nussbaum, 2001). Meyers suggests, for example, that ``diversity will
continue to seem threatening and that the obstacles to morally responding to difference
insuperable unless we augment our repertory of moral skills'' (1994, page 9, my italics).
``In particular'', she argues, ``intersubjective channels of communication and understanding must be opened through empathy'' (page 9). The main idea here is that
empathy is an affective and cognitive capacity that might be cultivated in order to
augment moral skills and promote ethical relations between people across social and
geopolitical boundaries. Secondly, there are authors who understand empathy primarily as a social relation or product of circulation (Ahmed, 2004; 2010; Berlant, 2004;
2008; Boler, 1999; Hemmings, 2011). In her analysis of `affective economies', Ahmed
(2004), for instance, argues that emotions do not ``reside in subjects or objects'' but,

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rather, ``are produced as effects of circulation'' (page 8). In contrast to theorists who
figure empathy as a capacity that individuals can cultivate, Ahmed suggests that understanding emotions as ``contained within the contours of the subject'' (page 46) risks
``transforming emotion into a property, as something one has, and can then pass on, as
if what passes on is the same thing'' (page 10). Similarly, in her discussion of emotions
as circulating within ``economies of the mind'', Boler (1999) understands emotions,
including empathy, not as residing ``within the individual'' but as ``mediating space''
(page 21). In her words, ``emotions are a medium, a space in which differences and
ethics are communicated, negotiated and shaped'' (page 21). For these theorists empathylike other emotionsis understood most productively as an investment in social
norms and relations of power
Keeping these debates about empathy and feminist and antiracist theory in mind,
I will now explore how discourses of empathy are being mobilised in two other arenas
where affective politics and hierarchies are at stake: recent American presidential
politics and popular business literatures. I am interested in examining how, and to
what ends, feminist and antiracist languages of `empathy', `care', `community', and `social
justice' are echoed, utilised, and/or appropriated within these literatures. Furthermore,
I aim to tease out some of the specific ways in which empathy is conceptualised
as a capacity, skill, and/or social relation across these sites and the critical implications of such understandings for theorising the politics of empathy in the context of
neoliberalism.
3 ``I feel your pain'': the political rhetorics of empathy
Rhetorics of care, compassion, and empathy have been pivotal to recent American
presidential politics. As Katherine Woodward (2004) argues, ``the political fortunes of
George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush'' all turned on a ``national discourse
of empathy'' (page 60). For Bill Clinton the empathetic catchphrase ``I feel your pain''
was a consistently successful mode of political rhetoric (Garber, 2004). Via the slogan
of `compassionate conservatism' the Republican Party skilfully ``appropriated the rhetoric of feeling that had been so powerfully associated with the Democrats''
(Woodward, 2004, page 59). Yet, as cultural theorists have pointed out, Republican
discourses of compassion served merely as a code for the privatisation of the state and
for the federal government's divestiture of responsibility for ameliorating social suffering through impelling individuals, local institutions, and faith-based organisations to
take up this obligation themselves (Berlant, 2004).
President Obama has not shied away from mobilising such affective rhetoric.
Indeed, a discourse of empathy was central to his 2008 presidential campaign. As
Obama writes in his second memoir, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming
the American Dream (2006a), ``a sense of empathy'' defines ``[my personal] moral code''
(page 66) and serves as ``a guidepost to my politics'' (page 67). Here, and elsewhere,
he argues that an `empathy deficit' characterises the nation's social and political life
and he calls on Americans to develop more empathetic attitudes towards those less
advantaged than themselves (page 67; see also Obama, 2006b):
``We wouldn't tolerate schools that don't teach, that are chronically underfunded and
understaffed and underinspired, if we thought that the children in them were like
our children. It's hard to imagine the CEO of a company giving himself a multimillion-dollar bonus while cutting health-care coverage for his workers if he
thought they were in some sense his equals. And it's safe to assume that those
in power would think longer and harder about launching a war if they envisioned
their own sons and daughters in harm's way'' (2006a, page 67, my italics).

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As this quote suggests, Obama is careful to distinguish his discourse of empathy from
conservative rhetorics of compassion. Echoing feminist and antiracist discussions, he
stresses the element of imaginative reconstruction and perspective-taking that empathy
entails. Empathy is not simply ``a call to sympathy and charity'', Obama argues, but,
rather, something ``more demanding, a call to stand in somebody else's shoes and see
through their eyes'' (page 66). Prompting one to see the world from another's perspective, empathy not only furnishes one with a better understanding and appreciation of
the situations and feelings of others but also demands the recognition of a common
humanity and equality.
In the light of feminist and antiracist arguments that empathy needs to be dialogical, it is interesting to note that Obama claims a vision of empathy premised on
mutuality. While he maintains that privileged subjects bear a particular obligation to
cultivate empathy towards those who are socially marginalised, he suggests that:
``[This] does not mean that those who are strugglingor those of us who claim to
speak for those who are strugglingare thereby freed from trying to understand
the perspectives of those who are better off. Black leaders need to appreciate the
legitimate fears that may cause some whites to resist affirmative action. Union
representatives can't afford not to understand the competitive pressures their
employers may be under. I am obligated to try to see the world through George
Bush's eyes, no matter how much I may disagree with him. That's what empathy
doesit calls us all to task, the conservative and the liberal, the powerful and the
powerless, the oppressed and the oppressor ... . No one is exempt from finding
common ground'' (2006a, page 68).
Furthermore, in contrast to the `localism' of compassionate conservatism, the
empathy Obama imagines might be understood as distinctly transnational in nature.
While Republican discourses ask `us' to ``cultivate compassion for those lacking in the
foundations for belonging where we live'' (Berlant, 2004, page 3, italics in original),
Obama advocates empathy which appears to transcend the borders of community and
nation. As Obama proclaimed in his inaugural address, ``we can no longer afford
indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world's resources
without regard to effect'' (2009). And in a widely cited commencement address to
Northwestern University in 2006 he argues, ``In a culture where those in power too
often encourage selfish impulses'' (2006b), we are told that ``the innocent people being
expelled from their homes half a world away are somebody else's problem to take care
of ''. Yet, now is the time, he stresses, for Americans to ``broaden, and not contract,
[their] ambit of concern'' and recognise their ``obligation to those who are less fortunate'' and their ``debt to all those who helped [them] get to where [they] are'' (2006b;
see also Obama, 2009). In this way Obama's emotional rhetoric might be seen to
resonate quite closely with the theorists discussed in section 2, such as Boler (1999),
Chabot Davis (2004), and Meyers (1994), who have emphasised the links between
empathy, power, privilege, and obligations across cultural and geopolitical borders
and boundaries.
Yet, the nature of Obama's empathy and its potential affinities with these feminist
and antiracist perspectives need to be assessed in the context of his administration's
wider neoliberal stance (see Berlant, 2008; Melamed, 2006; Reed Jr, 2008; Z izek, 2009).
In urging Americans to empathise with ``those who are different than us'', whether ``the
laid-off steel worker, [or] the immigrant woman cleaning your dorm room'' (2006b),
Obama appears to signal a desire to address gendered, classed, and racialised inequalities in a transnational political frame. However, it is important to note that this vision
of empathy which transcends national borders is articulated in the context of a
speech that simultaneouslyand predictablystresses the need to increase the nation's

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economic competitiveness in response to threats that `better educated' Chinese and

Indian `kids' will take `American' jobs (2006b). Upon closer inspection Obama's
image of the `empathetic American' is a risk-taking individual who not only cultivates
appropriate emotional capacities and skills but also engages in healthy economic
competitionin other words, an ideal neoliberal citizen.
As noted earlier, neoliberalism can be defined broadly as involving processes by
which market-oriented logics come to order and refigure modes of political governance
and citizenship. As Ong (2006) argues, ``neoliberal governmentality results from the
infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics''
(page 4). It involves the ``government of free individuals who are then induced to selfmanage according to market principles of discipline, efficiency and competitiveness''
(page 4). Following Nikolas Rose's (2006) reading of Michel Foucault's work, Ong
links neoliberal technology to ``a biopolitical mode of governing that centres on the
capacity and potential of individuals and populations as living resources that may
be harnessed and managed by governing regimes'' (2006, page 6, my italics). The
``neoliberal subject'', she maintains, is ``not a citizen with claims on the state but a
self-enterprising citizen-subject who is obligated to become an entrepreneur of himself
or herself '' (page 14, my italics). Theorists have also explored how contemporary
neoliberal forms of governmentality in `Western' contexts are intertwined with an
``emotionalization of society'' (Swan, 2008, page 89). Elaine Swan suggests that, while
``emotional literacy, emotional intelligence and emotional skills'' now form central components of school curriculums within North America, Western Europe, and Australia,
``emotional expressivity'' is also perceived as ``a new workplace resource with the
intensification of soft capitalism and its demands for emotional and aesthetic labour
from a range of types and levels of workers'' (page 89). From this perspective the ideal
neoliberal citizen and worker must be both ``agentic, enterprising and independent'' and
emotionally literate and expressive (page 100).
Obama's affective rhetoric reflects central aspects of this dominant neoliberal
framework. Reminding his audience that the `power' of the market to ``generate wealth
and expand freedom'' is both `unquestioned' and `unmatched' (2009), Obama impels
the American citizen to ``cultivate'' empathy as an emotional capacity alongside the
imperatives to ``challenge yourself '' and take ``greater risks in the face of greater odds''
as a means to ``realize your full potential'' (2006b, my italics). Obama maintains that
while developing an empathetic outlook is a necessary means of recognising one's
obligations to those less fortunate than oneself, cultivating empathy is crucial, above
all, ``because you have an obligation to yourself '' (2006b, my italics). In other words, I
would suggest, this is an obligation to be a caring and empathetic individual not only
because it is `the right thing to do' but also because empathy, as an emotional competency, has become part and parcel of being a self-managing and self-enterprising
individual within a neoliberal order (Boler, 1999; Swan, 2008). Importantly, for Obama,
the creation of more empathetic, risk-taking, and flexible neoliberal individuals is what
will bring about a more empathetic, resilient, and economically competitive nation. As
he puts it, ``cultivating empathy, challenging yourself, persevering in the face of adversitythese are all qualities I've found to be important in my own life. But what's true
for individuals can also be true for nations'' (2006b). In this respect it is relevant to
note that in the Audacity of Hope, and particularly in his earlier memoir Dreams From
My Father (2004 [1995]), Obama positions his own imagined biography as a synecdoche for the American nation. In these texts Obama's personal journey towards
empathy, identity, and community stands in forin fact, becomesthat which he
envisions for the United States as a nation: Obama's dreams become the American
dream (Remnick, 2010).

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4 Wired to care? Inside the empathy economy

We might therefore understand Obama's use of empathy as closely linked to the
rhetoric of the `empathy economy' within contemporary business discourses, which
figures empathy as a tool for increasing multinational corporations' competitiveness
and profits in the context of globalisationin other words, for extending the American
dream. As Bruce Nussbaum argues in a 2005 Business Week article, with the global
shift from a ``knowledge economy'' governed by technology to ``an experience economy'' dictated by consumers, companies that are able to `empathise' with the needs and
desires of their customers are most likely to prosper (2005, page 1; see also Lockwood,
2009; Rifkin, 2010). Dev Patnaik and Peter Mortensen's bestselling book Wired to
Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy (Patnaik with
Mortensen, 2009) is emblematic of this growing business trend. While Obama envisions
the `empathetic nation', Patnaik and Mortensen imagine the `empathetic company': to
``continue to grow and prosper'', they argue, corporations have to ``step outside of
themselves'' and ``walk in someone else's shoes'' (2009, page x). Through producing
`widespread empathy' amongst employees, companies like IMB and Nike have not
only become more in tune with the specific interests and needs of their customers,
they suggest, but also been able to discover and seize on new markets and ``opportunities
for growth'' (page xi).
Echoing Obama's political rhetoric, and the nominal language of feminist theory,
Patnaik and Mortensen understand empathy to involve both an orientation of care and
a process of perspective-taking. Surmising that ``the quickest way to have empathy for
someone else is to be just like them'', they suggest that ``for companies, the answer is to
hire their customers'' (page x). The ``empathetic connection'' that is triggered when
``producers and consumers'' are brought ``face to face'', Patnaik and Mortensen argue,
produces a ``caring response'' which means that both will ``be more likely to see each
other as people and treat each other better as a result'' (page 63). Yet, it is clear that
what is valued above all here is not care, ethics, or morality per se but, rather, how
empathy, as an affective technology for `knowing the other', can be mobilised to extract
increased profits via a return to ``capitalism in its oldest form'' (page 64) that is,
capitalism unfettered by cumbersome regulations. Indeed, Patnaik and Mortensen go
as far as to suggest that within the capitalist marketplace empathy could, in fact,
replace regulation (page 62). Thus, in common with feminist literatures, both the liberal
political rhetoric of empathy, articulated by Obama, and the business rhetoric of
empathy, expressed by Patnaik and Mortensen, figure empathy as that which connects
individuals to wider communities. Yet, unlike with feminist and antiracist scholars, the
emphasis here is not on empathy's potential role in building transnational social
justice. Rather, empathy is understood as a technology for `creating the many' as a
means to maximise economic competitiveness and growth within transnational circuits
of capital.
Interestingly, Obama's and Patnaik and Mortensen's visions of empathy are linked
not only through their common use of neoliberal rhetoric but also through their similar
indexing of neo-Darwinian evolutionary discourses. Through `awakening' empathy,
Obama claims, Americans can leave behind `childish' selfishness and progress into `mature'
adulthood (2006a; 2006b). ``It's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than
yourself '', he argues, ``that you will realize your true potentialand become full-grown''
(2006b, my italics). These ideas of individual maturity achieved through empathy are
then superimposed onto an ideal of national maturity: out of mature empathetic
individuals will evolve a mature empathetic America, ``an America that is more purposeful, more grown up than the America we have today'' (2006b). As their title Wired
to Care suggests, Patnaik and Mortensen's neoliberal articulation of empathy invokes

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neo-Darwinism even more explicitly. Like Obama's `empathetic American', Patnaik and
Mortensen's `empathetic employee' is a self-enterprising and risk-taking neoliberal
citizen, yet also one who capitalises on the human `instinct' for empathy (page 7).
Drawing out the implications of Obama's term `empathy deficit', Patnaik and Mortensen
characterise empathy as a ``power that every one of us already has'' (page ix) but one
that has not been developed to its full potential and thus needs to be `tapped into' and
cultivated to produce wider transnational value.
Evolutionary thinking has been central to how emotions are understood. The
Darwinian story of evolution is, as Ahmed argues, ``narrated not only as the triumph
of reason, but of the ability to control emotions, and to experience the `appropriate'
emotions at different times and places'' (2004, page 3, citing Elias, 1978). In the context
of dominant American discourses of neoliberalism, `the virtuous citizen' is constructed
not only as self-governing and self-enterprising but also through notions of `emotional
intelligence' which invoke the authority of cognitive science (Boler, 1999). As Boler
argues, ``the moral person is he who accepts his neurobiologically determined fate,
alongside the disciplined (Aristotelian) self-control, in order to express the right emotions at the right time, in the right way, through the acquired emotional skills'' (1999,
page 61). In both the political and business discourses discussed above, neoliberalism
and neo-Darwinism come together via the language of emotional intelligence to make
distinctions between those individuals who are able to demonstrate desirable/cultivated
emotions (ie, optimism and empathy) and suppress undesirable/primitive emotions (ie,
anger and anxiety) and those who are not (page 63). What this means is that only
certain individuals those who have the `right' emotionsare allowed to pass into the
wider communities of the nation or the corporation as fully fledged citizens or employees (Ahmed, 2004). In this respect it is worth noting how, although Obama regularly
alludes to histories of inequality, this is offset in his political memoirs and speeches by
his ability to position himself against `angry', `outdated' figures from the past (eg,
`militant' Black nationalists) (McNeil, 2010). This hierarchy of emotions is, in turn,
employed to make cultural, moral, and ethical distinctions between communities that
is, between more or less cultivated and more or less ethical nations and corporations.
In the context of the renewed `clash of civilisations' trope which has characterised
American domestic and foreign policy since 9/11, it seems significant that while Obama
was one of the few American politicians to acknowledge the importance of examining
the `sources' of the attacks (including climates ``of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and
despair''), he attributes the perpetrators' actions, above all, to their ``fundamental absence
of empathy'' (Remnick, 2010, page 337). In these ways we might understand Obama's
vision of empathy as linked not only to imperatives of national economic competitiveness
but also to the promotion of American cultural and moral exceptionalism (see Butler,
2008a).
From this perspective, we can think about how, in the shift from individual to
community via empathy figured in the political and business arenas, neoliberal biopolitics and geopolitics come together to regulate and distinguish between both subjects
and populations. In the context of contemporary neoliberal governmentality, biopolitics ``refers to a series of regulatory controls exerted on the population and on
individuals in order to harness and extract life forces'' (Ong, 2006, page 13). In this
way we can see how through the construction of the nation and the corporation as
`emotional collectivities' individuals are transformed into populations to be governed, in
part, through the mobilisation of affective hierarchies (see Ahmed, 2004; Hochschild,
2003 [1983]; Rabinow and Rose, 2006; Rose, 2006). On the one hand, empathy can be
conceived as a human `life force' which is extracted from the individual as he or she
becomes an ``entrepreneur of himself or herself '' (Ong, 2006, page 14). On the other

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hand, empathy itself becomes a technology of regulation: it produces subjects and

populations and the means to regulate them (Grewal, 2005). In other words, in
cultivating `empathy', citizens fuel nationalism by developing a marketable skill which
not only contributes to American economic competitiveness but also furnishes articulations of American cultural and ethical exceptionalism. Similarly, workers serve the
interests of multinational corporations not only by employing affective techniques to
identify opportunities for capital accumulation but also through upholding lucrative
branding strategies which mobilise rhetorics of corporate ethics and social responsibility. Although the forms of self-governance which these practices of `empathy' entail
are likely to function only in the interests of a small number of (already privileged)
subjects within `the nation' or `the corporation', they are produced and maintained,
in part, through generating individuals' affective attachments to these collective
forms. Indeed, in both the political and business narratives, empathy promises to offer
individuals a vital sense of belonging through becoming part of a wider affective
community. As such, the operation of these discourses of empathy within the political
and business arenas might be understood to illustrate not an `emptying' of feeling
but, rather, precisely how ``emotions can attach us to the very conditions of our
subordination'' (Ahmed, 2004, page 12).
Thus, if empathy is conceived within (some) feminist and antiracist analyses as an
emotional resource that in linking individual to community can promote a radical
interrogation of social inequalities and recognition of one's complicity within social
and geopolitical hierarchies of power, it is conceptualised quite differently within both
Obama's political rhetoric and the ideology of the empathy economy. In these arenas
empathy can be seen as an individual instinct which, when cultivated appropriately,
translates into collective competency to produce economic, cultural, and political
value. In order to work as a tool to accumulate this value, empathy must distinguish
between subjects in terms of the value they hold within transnational political economies governed by neoliberal market logics. In this way the circulation of empathy
constitutes subjects/bodies of greater and lesser value on the basis of the marketable
skills and resources they are understood to possess a process which (re)produces a
range of social and geopolitical distinctions and exclusions. What the turn to empathy
in both politics and business avoids, of course, is a range of complex questions about
the links between affect and power: that is, who has access to profitable affective
capital and who is confined to performing unrecognised emotional labour? How are
possibilities of empathetic engagement dependent on time and material resources?
Who cannot be empathetic and what does it mean to be excluded from this prevailing
affective injunction? And how do the answers to all these questions depend on norms
and relations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation? A critical approach to thinking through the politics of empathy in the context of neoliberalism, therefore, needs to
be able to take into account empathy's uneven effects the particular hierarchies it can
(re)producein a global frame.
Moreover, my analysis underscores, as feminist cultural theorists have argued, that
we cannot know or fix in advance how empathy works or what it does. Nor can we
assume that it will be experienced as the same feeling with the same effects across
different subjects and contexts. Yet, in the spirit of this last point, I want to suggest that
we should not rest simply on dismissing Obama's empathy as `nationalist', `imperialist',
or `neoliberal', or, indeed, in assuming that it can be read or have effects only with the
parameters of Obama as subject. In section 5, I unpack the complexity of Obama's
empathy further, gesturing to its potential life and effects beyond his own political
communication, through exploring Obama-mania as an affective economy which
involves the intersection of empathy, hope, and imagination.

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5 ``I feel your hope'': empathy, imagination, and Obama-mania

While empathy played an important rhetorical role in Obama's 2008 presidential
campaign, the real affective charge of his political discourse was arguably rooted
primarily in his ability to intertwine empathy with hope. As Lauren Berlant argues,
in contrast to Clinton's empathetic catchphrase, ``I feel your pain'', Obama's message is
``more like I feel your hope'' (2008). As the final years of the Bush regime and its
catalogue of injustices unravelled, it was the bruised and battered (yet not fully
extinguished) hope of Americansas well as those outside the borders of the United
Statesfor something different and more just that Obama expresses empathy for.
Empathy and hope might be understood as linked on the basis that they are both
`wish feelings'. While hope could be described as a `wish orientation' towards future
objects or possibilities which are perceived as necessary, good, or pleasurable but
which are not yet present (Ahmed, 2010, page 181), empathy could be conceptualised
as a wish that one could feel what another feels and know what it is like to see the
world from his or her perspective (Bartky, 1996; Spelman, 1997) Both affects remain
`wishful' because they are always in process rather than achieved. Furthermore, as wish
feelings that are often imagined to be shared (`I feel your hope') both empathy and
hope can function by `opening up lines of communication' yet also involve multiple
forms of `miscommunication' (if you felt that you shared hope with others, was their
hope the same hope? Did you really feel what another felt or did you simply project
your own feelings or view of the world onto the other?) Hope, from this perspective,
can mirror empathy as a wish feeling ``in which subjects feel something other than what
another feels in the very moment of imagining they could feel what another feels''
(Ahmed, 2004, page 7).
In Obama's rhetoric it is primarily the concept of imagination that binds together
empathy and hope affirmatively as wish feelings. In other words, the meaning and
promise of both affects are rooted in the possibilities of imagination: in order to be
empathetic, one must attempt to imagine what it is like to be another, to experience
things that one might not have experienced, or might not ever experience, oneself. In
order to be hopeful, in turn, one must be able to imagine a future for oneself and
others that is different from the status quo. More than this, what Obama claims
to share (to feel alongside other Americans and citizens of the world) is hope for
alternative futures even where this hope may seem audacious, impossible, or, indeed,
hopeless. In this particular respect we might understand Obama's political rhetoric as
taking its cues less from neoliberal political and business discourses and more from the
traditions of Black radical political thought. Robin Kelley (2002) argues that what has
distinguished Black radical thought, above all, is an ability to envision how the world
could be radically different, even if in the context of violence, oppression, and
marginalisationsuch `freedom dreams' seem unimaginable. This power of imagination, he suggests, draws on empathy to ``relive horrors'' and on hope to ``transport us to
another place'' (page 9).
If such practices of radical thought make it possible to interrogate what has been
assumed to be inevitable and to articulate radically ``different cognitive maps of the
future'' (page 10), then we can consider how Obama's rhetoric of empathy and hope
might work more radically to open up alternative visions of social justice and community. From this perspective Obama's discourse could provide a lens through which to
envision political communities not as fixed (as if there are discrete `communities' that
preexist `individuals' and which `individuals' may simply be compelled to join or interrogate via the emotional charge of empathy) (Ahmed and Fortier, 2003) but, rather, as
affectively fluid, as formed and (re)formed in potentially transformative ways through
empathy and hope. Such an understanding could, in turn, enable different ways of

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thinking through the relationships between empathy, responsibility, and social justice. In
other words, rather than theorising ethical obligations primarily within neoliberal
logics of individual self-regulation or imperialistic discourses of American exceptionalism, we might conceptualise a model of `social connection' in which ``obligations of
justice arise between persons by virtue of the social processes that connect them''
across borders and boundaries (Young, 2006, page 102).
And, yet, as I suggest in sections 3 and 4, there remain significant limitations on
the `radical imagination' that Obama's rhetoric offers. In Obama's mobilisation of his
personal biography as a synecdoche for the affective evolution of America as a nation,
``A skinny kid with a funny name'' (Obama, 2004) is able to redefine the American
dream and even become president; however, neither the political and economic hegemony of the United States nor the inevitability of neoliberal market politics can be
questioned in any substantive way. These remain fundamental boundaries limiting the
`alternative' visions of change, community, and social justice that Obama's rhetoric can
allow. Indeed, in positing an empathy premised on little more than a liberal concern
for `the other' as a solution to complex political antagonisms, Obama reduces the
structural to the emotional and the personal without ever unpacking their intertwinement and its significance to social and political life. Thus, it is clear that, like empathy,
hope can function as a technology of control and regulation, working to sustain
affective attachment to dominant social and economic forms and structures in the
context of neoliberal governmentality (see Berlant, 2008; Zizek, 2009). Obama's first
three years in office have, in many ways, confirmed such observations. While the
institutional pressures facing Obama in his first months as President should not be
underestimated, the outcome of his approach to governing through empathy seeing
from the perspective of all sides in order to arrive at a `common ground' has arguably
been a centrist policy focused primarily on appeasing his critics on the Right (Dumm,
2011, page 252). Indeed, the affective narrative of hope and empathy that was so
seductive to so many throughout Obama's election campaign hasfrom the arena of
health care reform to the war in Iraq, to the Wall Street bailoutled not to a radical
``break with current political history'' but, rather, to political inertia, with Obama
promoting ``quasi-Republican economic and foreign policy norms'' (Newfield, 2011,
page 244).
Nonetheless, I want to argue that examining the phenomenon of Obama-mania and
its aftermath may provide a starting point for moving beyond the imperialist/neoliberal
contours of Obama's own political practices to think about the politics of empathy,
hope, and imagination differently. Obama-mania has been described as the incredible
generation of political energy, hope, and enthusiasm which compelled millions of
Americans to vote, volunteer, and lobby for a previously marginal candidate who
was thought to have little chance of winning the presidency. Importantly, despite the
`American exceptionalism' constraining Obama's own affective rhetoric, ``the investment
in him as a figure of hope ... stretched far beyond the borders of the United States''
(Coleman and Ferreday, 2010, page 313). So, in turn, did the enthusiasm generated by
his previously `unimaginable' victory, ``with people dancing in the streets from Berlin to
Rio de Janeiro'' (Zizek, 2009, page 110). From this perspective, while we could certainly
see Obama-mania as produced within the neoliberal contours of global consumer
culture, we might also view it as an example of how the enormous affective charge
of hope and empathy can have transformative political effects and of how emotion can
provide a space in which to stimulate political action and build engaged communities at
the transnational level in the ways feminist and antiracist theorists imagine.
The point I want to make about Obama-mania, however, is that in arising as a
fluid community (or assemblage of communities) generated in part through empathy

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and hope (`I feel your hope') it was not static, homogenous, or uncritical in relation to
its `figure of hope'. Rather, Obama-mania represented an affective economy that was
not confined to (and, indeed, exceeded) Obama as a subject. For example, many
people who acknowledged explicitly that they did not agree with some of Obama's
key policies still supported and voted for him. Of course, this fact should not be
interpreted as positive in and of itself. As critical commentators have suggested, the
widespread and unexpected support of Obama in the 2008 election may have incorporated what has been referred to as the ``counter Bradley-effect'': ``when voters could
and did explicitly own up to their own racism, but said they would vote for Obama
anyways'' because they thought, for example, that he was ``probably better for the
economy'' (Butler, 2008b). In this respect it is important to note how ``support for
Obama has coincided with conservative causes'' (2008b) and has worked to uphold
neoliberal forms of social and economic regulation. And yet, the ambivalent nature of
support for Obama also points to the existence of a public discourse which recognised
that `we' were not all joined through `our' hope as one, that hope for Obama or for
change was not necessarily the same hope: that, is, despite its rhetoric of shared hope
for change (`yes we can'), there remained (and remains) ongoing discussion about the
differentiated nature of that hope
One key strand of public critique regarding what Obama-esque hope meant, and
what it was directed towards, focused on his ideal of national unity. Here we might
consider the widely circulated commentary posted online by Judith Butler (or at
least posted under the name `Judith Butler') (2) the day after the election. In this
piece Butler speaks of her experience of being ``overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement'' at Obama's victory (2008b). And yet, she warns against investing uncritically
in the `heightened modes' of national unity and identification that discourses of
Obama-mania imply, not least because of the differentiated implications with respect
to citizenship rights and entitlements they entail. As she reminds her readers, ``Obama
has not explicitly supported gay marriage rights''. Moreover, in the state of California,
``he won 60% of the vote, and yet some significant portion of those who voted for him
also voted against the legalization of gay marriage (52%).'' Although this think piece
by an American feminist philosopher may not seem like sufficient `evidence' to
argue for more significant recognition of the differentiated experiences of hope that
Obama-mania entailed, I would suggest that Butler's posting is representative of wider
discourses circulating online the day after the election. While in the early hours of
5 November 2008 many Obama supporters hailed the emergence of a `new dawn' for
American politics on Facebook and Twitter, others mediated this exuberance by
lamenting the passing of Proposition 8: the controversial legislation against same-sex
marriage in California which coincided with support for Obama in that state. Such
exchanges created opportunities for critical reflection on the exclusions which `progressive' ideals of national unity can entail, and on how `shared' hopes so often depend
on affective, social, and geopolitical distinctions. Acknowledging how hope functions
as a `political economy' in this way (Ahmed, 2010) involves empathy: it requires
attempting to see from someone else's perspective, or, indeed, realising that you
cannot, and being affectively unsettled by that `failure' of empathy, by empathy's failure
to live up to its own promise.
Yet for others still, focusing narrowly on Obama's failure to support same-sex
marriage as symbolic of the exclusions on which his affective narrative depended
was a dangerous foil. In his discussion of `queer futurity', for instance, Jose Esteban
Munoz argues that to equate social justice for queers with the legalisation of same-sex
(2)

There remains some discrepancy regarding whether this post was authored by the University of
California, Berkeley, Professor Judith Butler or, rather, by someone else using her name.

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marriage can only mean remaining stuck in (rather than imagining a world beyond)
the `straight' present through adopting a pragmatist `gay neoliberal' stance (2009). Such
``assimilationist gay politics'', he contends, ``posits an all that is in fact a few: queers
with enough access to capital to imagine a life integrated with North American
capitalist culture'' (2009, page 20; see also Puar, 2008). Failing to think beyond the
structural exclusions of the neoliberal present, this politics thus represents a ``symptom
of the erosion of the gay and lesbian political imagination'' (page 30). As Munoz puts
it, ``being ordinary and being married are both antiutopian wishes, desires that automatically rein themselves in, never daring to see or imagine the not-yet-conscious''
(page 21).
As Munoz's arguments suggest, theorising the politics of empathy in the context of
neoliberalism thus demands that we examine the links between emotion and temporality. Returning to Kelley's description of Black radical imagination as an affective
politics that draws on empathy to ``relive horrors'' and on hope to ``transport us to
another place'' is salient here (2002, page 9). In this understanding, hope is what
allows us to see beyond the present reality and envision radical alternatives. Empathy,
in turn, is not just an affective skill that allows one to recognise others' `differences'
in the here and now but also an affective relation that allows us to collectively
(re)imagine the past and feel its continuing impact in the present.
Here, Kelley's affective vision dovetails closely with Munoz's perspective as well as
with those of the feminist and antiracist theorists discussed earlier. Through the critical
intertwinement of empathy, hope, and imagination, structural legacies of injustice
associated with gender, race, sexuality, class, and nation are not simply washed away
by a neoliberal tide of hope, but kept in the foreground for the purpose of critiquing
the present and imagining radically different futures. Thus, contrary to Obama's `postracial' mode of empathetic engagement in which everyone is assumed to enter public
discourse on an even footing and in which competing perspectives can be adjudicated
by `putting oneself in the other's shoes', this affective politics is attentive to the
historical relations of power which continue to fracture access to affective capital, on
the one hand, while stratifying affective labour, on the other (Hochschild, 2003 [1983];
Swan, 2008). In keeping attention on the structural causes of suffering, this approach
does not seek to ``protect us from what hurts'' (Ahmed, 2010, page 215, citing Lorde),
but it does ``reject the sentimentalization of the political as the extension of the
domestic feeling throughout a space where feeling comes first and structure later''
(Berlant, 2011, page 240).
Within this affective politics, however, neither the future nor the past is conceived
as static. As Munoz (2009) explains, in calling on the past to critique the present, queer
futurity seeks to reanimate the past and in doing so acknowledges that the past is
performative: it does things. For example, in directing a `posterior glance' to quotidian
moments of queer `ecstasy' and `relationality' seized within 1980s heternormative,
capitalist American culture, Munoz seeks to offer ``an anticipatory illumination of
queerness'', which both refigures neoliberal representations of queer subjectivity in
contemporary popular culture and resituates queerness as ``something that is not yet
here'' (page 22). Therefore, while the view these perspectives suggest is future oriented,
it does not depend on a linear and self-naturalising temporality that places some
people as progressing forward (ie, `gay neoliberals' or `privileged subjects' who develop
empathy as a marketable capacity) and others as stuck in the past (ie, `angry Black
nationalists', `unempathetic terrorists', or those relegated to performing unrecognised
affective labour). Instead, this view seeks to scramble this exclusionary linearity by
holding different temporalities together in unsettling and potentially transformative
ways. Furthermore, and crucially, the point of such affective politics is not to hope

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that hope will not be disappointed. As Munoz emphasises, ``utopian feelings can and
regularly will be disappointed'' (2009, page 8). Yet, such disappointment needs to be
risked if the ``disabling political pessimism'' which characterises the neoliberal present
``is to be displaced'' rather than merely reinscribed (page 9). From this perspective,
while we may now see Obama-mania as merely a precursor to political disappointment, we might also mine this affective phenomenon for the moments of critical
affective praxis it offersfor the modes of thinking and feeling beyond the here and
now that it suggests.
6 Conclusions: different spaces and times of social justice
Through its analysis of American presidential politics, contemporary business literatures, and critical theory, I have offered a critical reading of the ambivalent grammar of
empathy. While, as an affective relation, empathy may enable transformative connections, it can also (re)produce dominant hierarchies and exclusions. More specifically,
within the context of American discourses of neoliberal governmentality, feminist and
antiracist conceptualisations of empathy as an affective capacity or skill are susceptible
to appropriation by market-oriented rhetorics that are arguably concerned with `care',
`equality', and `social justice' primarily to the extent that they can be incorporated
within, or leveraged to advance, goals of economic competitiveness. As my reading
of Obama's political communication and Patnaik and Mortensen's business rhetoric
has illustrated, such neoliberal economic imperatives are often achieved through carving out social and geopolitical distinctions which produce cultural and moral differences
bound up with temporally based emotional hierarchies. Furthermore, when empathy
becomes a competency defined primarily in terms of its market value it can also become
a technology of regulation, producing and differentiating affective subjects and populations and the means to govern them. My analysis has suggested that these processes
of regulation do not necessarily function to `empty' empathy of feeling. Strong feelings
of identification, care, and/or concern are likely be generated within and through these
shifting neoliberal structures and circuits, but often with an orientation towards maintainingrather than contestingthe exclusionary operation of normative political and
economic forms, such as the American nation and the multinational corporation.
I have argued, however, that reading the ambivalence of Obama's empathy also
requires considering the ways in which it exceeds him as a subject. In arising as an
uneven transnational community (or assemblage of communities) generated in part
through affective intersections of empathy, hope, and imagination, Obama-mania was
not, I have suggested, static or uncritical. Critical space was created by (some of ) those
apparently caught up in the affective charge of Obama-mania to interrogate the social
and geopolitical distinctions and exclusions its ideal of national unity entailed: in other
words, to acknowledge through empathy how Obama-esque hope functioned as an
affective economy wherein hope was unevenly distributed. As such, Obama-mania
provides an example through which empathy may be conceptualised not only as an
affective capacity, skill, or competency but also as a political space of mediation in
which the ambivalent (and often exclusionary) nature of empathy and hope as wish
feelings can be examined and negotiated. In turn, I want to suggest, to conceptualise
empathy as a space of mediation is also to see it as mediating space. Within this
understanding, empathy is not just about attempting to `know' or `feel' how another
feels but about seeking to understand the structures of feeling and the feelings of
structure (Ahmed, 2010) that produce and mediate us differentially as subjects and
communities who feel.
If theorising empathy's spatiality is vital to thinking through the politics of empathy in the context of neoliberalism, so too is interrogating empathy's temporality.

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As I have argued, while neoliberal visions of social justice evacuate `past' legacies of
oppression and inequality to envision an `empathetic' market society that transcends
(but in reality re-entrenches) social divisions, neo-Darwinian evolutionary perspectives
mobilise empathy to shore up temporally based hierarchies of morality and progress.
By contrast, a critical intertwinement of empathy, hope, and imagination informed by
feminist, antiracist, and queer perspectives seeks to keep structural legacies of injustice
in the foreground precisely for the purpose of critiquing the present and imagining
radically different futures. While this affective politics looks towards the future, it does
not depend on a linear temporality that positions some people as progressing forward
and others as stuck in the past. Instead, it scrambles this exclusionary trajectory by
holding different temporalities together, examining how the future can be radically
reimagined through engaging empathetically with the performative force of the past
(Munoz, 2009). From this perspective the relationship between empathy and social
justice is not simply about the creation of affective connections and openings that
allow `difference', power, and complicity to be recognised and negotiated in the present.
It is also about how empathy might function as an affective portal to imagining, and
journeying towards, different spaces and times of social justice.
Acknowledgements. Many of the ideas with which this paper engages grew out of stimulating
conversations with Sara Ahmed during my ESRC postdoctoral fellowship at Goldsmiths in 2008.
My thanks go to Sara for providing ongoing intellectual inspiration and for engaging so thoughtfully and supportively with my work. I am also grateful, as ever, to Clare Hemmings for her careful
reading, incisive feedback, and enthusiastic support. Clare's exciting work on affect and feminist
theory has shaped my own research in important ways and I thank her for sharing it with me at an
earlier stage. Thanks also to Angharad Closs Stephens, Joanne Kalogeras, Daniel McNeil, Anne
Whitehead, Amy Hinterberger, Rebecca Coleman, Laurie Pedwell, and David Pedwell, who all
read drafts and provided extremely thoughtful comments, and to the two anonymous reviewers for
their incisive feedback and suggestions. Finally, I am also indebted to participants in the `Affecting
Feminism' conferences held at Newcastle University in 2010 for their thought-provoking questions
and comments.
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