SO742 SPR

Emotion, Media and Culture

12. How does Carole King’s song ‘(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ help to
illustrate ‘the cultural politics of emotion’?

In the 2015 MNSBC 7 Days of Genius interview, Carole King (2015), America’s
twentieth-century most successful female songwriter, talks about her career as a female artist.
She says that she never felt constrained by her gender and yet she admits that she had to follow
society’s rules and expectations such as getting married. She became tremendously successful
not only because of her talent but because she played by the rules society instituted. King
proudly admits that she helped shaping American culture, since millions of people grew up
with her songs as soundtracks of their lives (King, 2015). However, she seems unaware that if
the lyrics of her songs mirror so much American culture, they also attain themselves to the
social script. Accordingly, her songs became part of that power structure she herself believes
to have escaped by becoming a successful female artist. She unconsciously plays an active role
in the maintenance of the rules and categorizations governing society and keeping it
homogenous and compliant with the established norms.
In this essay, through the analysis of the song (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman by
Carole King, I will illustrate the relation between culture and emotions and the dynamic of
control ruling these central aspects of human life. This text well captures how the social
construct controls emotions and how this power structure works and is maintained, thus
influencing individuals’ life experiences. My argument will firstly look at the interrelation of
culture and emotions, considering them within the theory of social constructionism. Secondly,
it will illustrate how emotions are controlled because they are considered as a threat to the
social order. And lastly, it will show how the cycle of social control can be broken in order to
shape a new discourse free from previous cultural restraints.

Emotions permeate every instance of human existence. Similarly to language, emotions

are key to social interactions and communication (Greco, 2009). By living in a social
environment, the subjects’ language of emotions has to take into consideration a context-
specific cultural variable (Swan, 2008). Therefore, language, emotions and social practices, or
culture, are strictly interconnected. Considering these relations, emotions can be defined as

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discursive practices. Thus, emotions are no longer considered as inner, naturally existing and
reflexive individual responses, but actually as cultural and situational responses that “reflect
and reinforce cultural values” (Candace, 1988, p. 415). The theory of social constructionism
analyses the socio-cultural practices on which the collectivity builds its reality. For the
constructionists, reality is created and understood through culture and its communicative
processes (Andrews, 2012). Hence, the collectivity of subjects learns and perpetuates cultural
practices by being in contact with the external environment (Williams, 1977). The constructive
process of culture is so powerful that makes people believe that society’s moral order is natural
and absolute. Social practices of everyday life are reproduced by social representations as well
as individuals, who would then construct their own moral code accordingly. Through this moral
order and the constructive process of thinking, culture and roles are considered by society as a
given, something proven, authentic and established (Markus and Kitayama, 1992).
Western societies provide individuals with a culturally implemented script, which is supposed
to be a guideline for behavior, emotions and expression of feelings (Markus and Kitayama,
1992). This cultural script is based on assumptions; Shweder claims, “such assumptions
become so highly shared among the members of society, and so taken for granted by them, that
they attain the quality of ‘zero-order beliefs’” (Markus and Kitayama, 1992, pp. 361-2). These
social representations or ‘zero-order believes’ are perceived as natural and are the parameters
or cultural frameworks used by the individual to understand the world. These social
representations can of course be consciously as well as unconsciously internalized by the
subject through the social media, films, radio and magazines, which are all complying and are
uniformed to the preapproved model of culture. The cultural industry is one of the filters
through which individuals perceive the world. Accordingly, real life is becoming more and
more a projection of popular culture (Horkheimer and Adorno, 2010 [1944]). Songs such as
‘(You Make me Feel Like) A Natural Woman’ by Carole King made women living in the United
States of the 1960s sympathies as well as recognize themselves in the lyrics of the song. They
experienced the same emotions because the cultural script of society homogenizes the
individual emotional process. Emotional responses go from being differentiated at birth to later
become uniformed due to the experience of cultural practices and social representations. We
are not all born the same way, but are raised to become one with our assigned category whether
of class, gender or race.

Simone de Beauvoir (in Witting, 1993, p. 103) famously claims, “one is not born, but
becomes a woman”. This quote well illustrates the influence of culture on the subject but also
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the politics of power in place within culture and especially within King’s song ‘(You Make Me
Feel Like) A Natural Woman’. As previously said, the social scripting, the cultural practices
and education one is subject to from birth, have the purpose of dividing society into
homogenous categories. These categories, whether of gender, identity, race, or class, are
regulated by cultural structures, which control, normalize and naturalize these very oppressive
regulations through social performance and scripting (Butler, 1993, p. 308). Taking into
consideration the category of the woman within western society, it is possible to see how it is
controlled by the patriarchal power structures in place. Western society seems to be ‘allergic’
to emotions, and the common belief attributing emotions to women brings about the need to
control this ‘threatening’ category via the management of emotions (Lutz, 2009). However,
Lutz argues that the very rhetoric of emotional control reproduces the cultural view of emotion
as irrational, dangerous, and a manifestation of weakness; it also implicitly reinforces the image
of women as the more emotional gender, which needs to undergo a process of self-control
(Lutz, 2009). Susan Shott (2008, p. 118) suggests that “social control is, in large part, self-
control”. With this statement, she proposes that social control is actuated by individual self-
criticism and a psychological obligation to conform; which if not met is punished through guilt
and shame. This emotional management takes place on different levels, the cognitive, the
bodily and the expressive; therefore, it not only represses deviant ideas but also involves
physical constraints (Hochschild, 2009). Accordingly, emotions, similarly to gender are
performed following a culturally constructed script (Butler, 1993). Therefore, it can be said
that women are controllers of emotions but also ‘controllees’ of society (Lutz, 2009, p. 66).
Megan Boler (1999) also writes in her book Feeling Power how ‘outlaw emotions’ such as
anger, indignation, exasperation are a threat to the society’s power structures, especially if
publicly displayed. Therefore, emotions tend to be relegated to the private sphere, and since
women are regarded as the more emotional gender, they are assigned to the domestic, enclosed
sphere. Attributing to women nurturing, caring and emotional qualities upheld the gender
hierarchy, leaving power and the public sphere in the control of men (Boler, 1999).

In the song (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman, the woman is ‘Looking out on
the morning rain’, therefore she is inside within the private sphere, and she is feeling
‘uninspired’ and ‘tired’, she is very much adrift and low-spirited (Franklyn, 1967, l. 1, 2, 4).
So far, she is experiencing the ‘outlaw’ emotions, which are a threat to societal power structures
as well as to herself as a woman. However, she meets a man, who by ‘claiming her’ changes
completely her emotional state. She says, ‘Now I'm no longer doubtful, of what I'm living for/
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And if I make you happy I don't need to do more’ (Franklyn, 1967, l. 16, 17), with these words
she has finally found a purpose which gives her life meaning. However, considering what Sara
Ahmed (2010) writes in The Promise of Happiness, it is suggested that culture and social
institutions seem to send a subliminal message on the recipe of happiness, which can also be
used to justify oppression, for instance ‘the happy housewife’. In fact, as today, the primary
happiness indicator is still marriage (Ahmed, 2010). Ahmed (2010) later adds that the crisis in
happiness has failed to question social ideals and has instead reinvigorated their control over
both psychic and political life. The lyrics of the song reinforce the culturally constructed
narrative of the woman, getting married, serving her husband and finding happiness within the
domestic sphere. Furthermore, she says that he ‘makes her feel like a natural woman’. Who is
a ‘natural’ woman? Rousseau describes the natural woman as someone who honors her duty,
her position within society and the marriage bond as a woman and is passive, dependent,
sensitive, nurturing, etc. (Okin, 1979). However, Monique Wittig, in her text One is not Born
a Woman, destroys the patriarchal view that women are a ‘natural group’. She claims that it is
society and civilization as a whole that produced the creature described as feminine (Wittig,
1993). She argues that by ‘biologizing’ the category of men throughout history, making it pre-
given, the current division of gender roles was brought about. Hence, she claims that who is
defined as ‘natural’ is someone that complies with society’s expectations, while ‘unnatural’ is
who rebels to the canon and the social conventions. Therefore, the unnatural or not real woman
is the one individual that refuses the economic, ideological and the political power of a man
(Wittig, 1993). Respectively, in the case of King’s song, ‘feeling like a natural woman’ means
compliance with the role society has assigned the woman, thus perpetuating and reproducing
the cultural script, which has originally influenced the lyrics of the song in the first place.
However, it is worth taking into consideration that the song became famous through the voice
of Aretha Franklyn, African-American soul singer, and perhaps this fact challenges the rigidity
of the category of the woman, which apparently blurs its boundary in favor of the inclusion of
race. In fact, traditionally the ‘natural woman’ had been portrayed as white. Despite this racial
inclusion to the category of the ‘natural woman’, the lyrics still reinforce and perpetuate the
cultural script of what it means being a woman and the positive reward deriving from
compliance.

Society’s control over the individual and its emotions is of course not absolute, as a
matter of fact, Lutz and Abu-Lughod (1990 in Boler, 1999, p.11) assert that emotions are the
hardest aspect of human experience to be controlled. Furthermore, Boler (1999) argues that
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emotions are not only the target for societal control but are also a mode of resistance to the
dominant cultural norms or to authoritative impositions. She suggests that one of the ways to
counteract the politics of control is to bring emotions from the private into the public sphere,
thus denouncing or expressing injustice or oppression (Boler, 1999). Being an integral part of
each individual, emotions can therefore be considered the common denominator of cultures
(Markus and Kitayama, 1992). In fact, counteractive movements calling on emotions, like
empathy, such as feminist and LGBT movements are found all over the world. In Foucault's
view, there is never a subject who is fully socialized and subsequently compliant to the cultural
practices formed through historically specific discourses (Cocker, 2014). Accordingly, only by
understanding how these discursive social constructions are formed, it is possible to create
change and form a discourse of resistance. Hence, education plays a fundamental role in
questioning common assumptions and values (Boler, 1999), as well as in learning about the
history of the western culture and its social practices of control. Therefore, it can be said that
power circulates within the social field and can be attached to strategies of domination as well
as those of resistance (Diamond, Quinby , 1988). King with her song ‘(You Make Me Feel Like)
A Natural Woman did not choose to seize power and construct a discourse deviating from the
cultural norm of the time. She did not add her song to the counter-current music written by
other artists such as David White and John Madara who composed in the same years You Don't
Own Me for Lesley Gore, which became an anthem for the US second-wave feminist
movement (Vincent, 2015).

Cultures and selves are defined as well as build upon each other in an ongoing cycle of
mutual constitution. The self is at the center of experience of life and culture, which is a social
construct; the self is shaped by this latter consciously and unconsciously, thus becoming a
cultural product (Markus, Kitayama, 2010). Emotions, which are the core of the individuals’
response system to the outer-world events, are greatly influenced by culture. As Greco and
Stenner (2009) argue, emotions can be described, predicted and controlled, since they are
culturally dependent. Dominant power structures tend to control society through a cultural
script, regulating emotions, behavior and membership to a defined category. These politics of
control are reproduced through popular culture, social institutions and cultural representations
on an everyday basis, thus becoming internalized as well as considered by individuals as zero-
order-believes or unquestionable natural givens. Carole King’s song ‘(You Make Me Feel Like)
A Natural Woman serves as an example for the reproduction of an encrypted patriarchal
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narrative reinforcing gender roles and perpetuating the preapproved dominant narrative. The
cycle of social control can however be broken by individuals by questioning the power
structures in place through learning about the history and politics of social, cultural and political
control. By bringing issues and emotions to the public realm, individuals are empowered to
create a community or an identity free from the constraining and homogenizing categories,
consequently making possible the creation of a new non-confirmative discourse
counterbalancing the dominant one.

Words: 2296

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