Emotion regime

The term emotion regime (also rendered by William Reddy as emotional regime, and in German published work as Gefühlsregime or “regime of feelings”) refers to the particular set of shared expectations that guide how people ought to feel and express themselves in particular social settings. The differing structures of these social norms shape the expectations that guide everyday conduct and vary across historical periods and communities. Reddy defines an emotional regime as a configuration of prescribed “emotives”—expressions that both describe and help produce feelings—together with the rituals and practices through which they are inculcated. By emphasizing the ways such norms channel expression, authorize some feelings, and suppress others, the concept highlights how affect is organized within specific social groups.

Promoting expected emotions about war production during World War II

The term was introduced and elaborated by Reddy in The Navigation of Feeling, where he analysed shifts in dominant emotion regimes during the French Revolution. Subsequent analysis in the history of emotions, sociology, and cultural theory has used the concept to examine how communities and institutions cultivate characteristic repertoires of feeling. It is often discussed alongside Barbara Rosenwein’s framework of emotional communities—groups that share norms, valuations, and styles of expression—which offers a complementary emphasis on plural emotional formations within a given society. Historians have also situated emotion regimes within broader historiographical debates about how community expectations of proper or acceptable behavior are formed and how they change over time.

As an analytic tool, the concept of an emotion regime allows researchers to describe how emotional norms are organized, maintained, and contested. It draws attention to the relationship between feeling and power, showing how political, religious, professional, or familial settings can cultivate expectations that shape conduct and constrain autonomy. Analysts have used the framework to investigate institutions, identity groups, political movements, and digital cultures, analysing how they enforce standards of affective expression and how individuals navigate or resist them.

Major definitions and scholarly debates on emotion regimes are presented alongside accounts of adjacent mechanisms through which they operate, historical and contemporary cases in which they appear, and their application across institutional, social, political, and digital contexts. The coverage also situates the concept in relation to adjacent analytic frameworks, including emotives, emotional communities, feeling rules, and emotional practices.

Emotion Regimes: An Overview

Emotion engineered by ritual spectacle and hyper synchrony

Patterns of expected feelings and displays shape many everyday environments, even if people rarely name them explicitly. Writers in the field use the term *emotion regime* to describe the shared expectations that prescribe how individuals ought to feel and express themselves in particular settings. These arrangements are historically situated and shaped by social power, a point emphasised in analysis arguing that emotions are not merely private states but structured responses shaped by cultural environments.

Everyday Settings Where Emotion Expectations Are Visible

People routinely navigate settings in which expectations about appropriate feelings are clearly marked. In schools, students may learn that enthusiasm is welcomed while frustration must be carefully controlled, reflecting the broader insight that social groups develop distinct patterns of feeling and expression—a dynamic that writers have described as *emotional communities*, meaning groups bound together through shared norms for interpreting and valuing feelings. Workplaces likewise cultivate expectations about demeanour; for instance, studies of service labour show how organisations encourage workers to display cheerfulness as part of professional conduct, thereby shaping the feelings considered suitable for the job. Online platforms also foster recurring affective patterns as users learn which styles of expression are rewarded, which discouraged, and how circulating feelings come to organise participation.

Relevance of the Concept

Identifying such patterned expectations is the core contribution of the concept of emotion regimes. The term highlights how norms guide what people ought to feel and how they ought to communicate those feelings, underscoring that these expectations are historically contingent rather than universal. Examination of group-specific feeling norms shows that institutions and communities cultivate shared repertoires of valued and disvalued feelings, shaping how members understand situations and each other. The hypothesis proposed is that cultural formations organise emotions in ways that reinforce or challenge social power, making the analysis of these arrangements an important tool for examining how norms, authority, and affective conduct intersect across different contexts. These insights prepare readers for the sections that follow, which examine how regimes operate through rules, sanctions, and symbolic forms embedded in institutional and social life.

Defining the Concept

Understanding the term “emotion regime” requires both an accessible point of entry and a clear account of how writers in the field use the concept. Historians employ the term to describe patterned structures that shape how feelings may be expressed, interpreted, and regulated in specific settings. This section introduces the idea in everyday terms before outlining its canonical academic definition and distinguishing it from related concepts.

Simple Definition

An emotion regime can be understood as the patterned environment of emotional expectations that surrounds people in a particular setting. It refers to the ways social groups, institutions, or societies signal which feelings should be expressed, which should be muted, and how individuals are expected to display those feelings in everyday interactions. These expectations may be conveyed through routines, rituals, or informal cues about what counts as an appropriate response in a given situation.

Canonical Academic Definition

In the historical study of emotions, the concept takes on a more precise meaning. Rosenwein summarizes William Reddy's definition as “the set of normative emotions and the official rituals, practices, and emotives that express and inculcate them.” In Reddy's framework, regimes prescribe which feelings count as legitimate, how they should be articulated, and how individuals are expected to orient themselves toward those norms. Because emotive expressions both describe and alter a speaker's feelings, the norms governing them become a powerful means through which institutions or authorities shape emotional life.

Conceptual Elements of an Emotion Regime

Emotion regimes consist of several interconnected elements. First, they articulate norms that define which feelings and expressions are valued, discouraged, or prohibited. Second, regimes rely on rituals and practices—such as commemorations, public declarations, gestures, or forms of address—that reinforce these norms in daily life. Third, they establish mechanisms for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate feelings, whether through praise, censure, or more formal sanctions. Finally, emotion regimes are historically and culturally specific: they emerge in response to particular social conditions, and shifts in regimes often occur when their norms generate significant emotional strain or conflict.

Distinguishing “Emotion Regimes” from Related Concepts

Arlie Russell Hochschild, leading architect of feeling rules whose pioneering concepts reshaped sociological understandings of how communities organize and regulate affect.

Although related to several neighboring terms, “emotion regime” has a distinct analytical focus. Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities—groups bound together by shared norms, values, and styles of emotional expression—describes the affective cohesion of a community rather than the externally imposed standards enforced by authorities. An emotion regime, by contrast, highlights regulation, prescription, and the power-laden processes by which emotional norms are maintained. Reddy's concept also intersects with sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s idea of feeling rules, which identify micro-level expectations guiding individual emotional expression, but emotion regimes encompass broader institutional and political structures that set and enforce those rules. Together, these distinctions clarify what the term contributes to the historical and social analysis of patterned feeling.

How Emotion Regimes Work

Emotion regimes operate through interlocking patterns of customary behavior that guide how people are expected to feel, express themselves, and interpret social situations. Writers in the field highlight several mechanisms—prescriptive rules, interpretive frames, sanctions, ritual forms, and possibilities for change—that together shape patterned emotional conduct within specific settings.

Feeling Rules

Hochschild introduced the concept of “feeling rules,” defining them as shared standards that specify what one “ought to feel” in particular situations and how those feelings should be expressed in order to sustain proper social relations. These norms help determine whether individuals should induce, suppress, or modify feelings, and they are central to workplace settings where interaction with clients or passengers requires managing one's affective display. Hochschild argues that individuals engage in “emotion management” to meet these rules, a process that may involve either surface acting or deep acting when the emotional expectations built into a job demand sustained forms of cheerfulness, patience, or calm . Feeling rules thus provide the shared expectations that emotion regimes rely on to indicate what counts as appropriate conduct.

Expectations and Interpretive Frames

Beyond explicit feeling rules, people learn to interpret situations through culturally shared frames that guide the emotions they take to be appropriate. Drawing on Erving Goffman’s account of the interaction order, analysts emphasize that social encounters rely on tacit definitions of the situation that structure alignments, obligations, and expectations. In face-to-face encounters, participants continuously manage “face”—their social value—by orienting to cues that signal respect, deference, or involvement. These frames help organize emotional expectations by indicating whether embarrassment, reassurance, restraint, or warmth is situationally appropriate . In collective settings, shared ways of understanding situations also shape the feelings people learn to use, helping them identify what counts as a grievance, which emotions are seen as acceptable, and which responses are socially approved. .

Sanctions and Social Enforcement

Emotion regimes are sustained through formal and informal sanctions that encourage conformity to patterned expectations. Thomas Scheff argues that shame and embarrassment form a central mechanism through which individuals monitor one another's adherence to social bonds and interactional obligations. Even subtle signs of rejection—a missed conversational beat or withheld acknowledgment—can produce shame and thereby reinforce norms of deference and alignment . Reddy similarly maintains that divergence between personal experience and a dominant regime's prescribed emotives can generate emotional suffering, as individuals struggle to navigate norms that do not correspond to their lived experience . Sanctions thus operate not only through explicit penalties but also through pervasive social cues that reinforce expected feeling and expression.

Symbolic and Ritual Components

Rituals and symbols play a major role in stabilizing patterned expectations within an emotion regime. Goffman's analysis of ritual elements shows that greetings, partings, honorifics, and other ceremonial gestures help reproduce shared understandings of propriety, thereby embedding the feelings a situation calls for within the fabric of social interaction. Such ritualized practices affirm the value of particular emotional stances—for example, reverence in formal ceremonies or composure in professional settings. Practice-oriented researchers further note that these enactments become habitual and embodied, as repeated gestures and patterned interactions train participants to respond with dispositions that align with the prevailing order . These symbolic and ritual components help make emotion regimes feel natural and taken for granted.

Change, Breakdown, and Emotional Agency

Emotion regimes are not fixed; they may loosen, fracture, or be replaced when their norms no longer align with lived experience. William Reddy introduces the concept of “emotional liberty” to describe moments when individuals or groups articulate feelings that exceed or contradict dominant prescriptions, allowing them to experiment with alternative forms of expression . Such moments often emerge in periods of political upheaval, institutional instability, or cultural transformation. Analysts of social movements further show how new repertoires of feeling can mobilize collective action when actors contest prevailing norms or construct alternative emotional scripts . In everyday life, people navigate tensions between personal experience and the expectations others place on them, sometimes complying, sometimes resisting, and thereby contributing to the gradual transformation of the regime itself.

Historical Emotion Regimes

Ute Frevert, leading historian of emotions whose research reveals how emotions function as historically contingent practices that structure social order and political authority.

Historians of emotions use the idea of emotion regimes or emotional regimes to describe historically specific configurations of prescribed feelings, evaluative vocabularies, and sanctioned practices that link inner experience to public order over time. Building on William Reddy's analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France and Ute Frevert’s work on modern Europe, research has traced how such regimes emerge, how they organise norms of feeling and expression, and how they are transformed through political upheaval, social change, and shifts in the language of feeling.

Reddy’s foundational historical cases

In The Navigation of Feeling, Reddy introduces “emotional regimes” (the term used in his text for what this article calls emotion regimes) as ensembles of prescribed “emotives” – speech acts that both express and help shape feeling – together with the rituals and institutional arrangements that support them. In his typology, regimes can be more or less strict: highly constraining regimes secure stability partly by producing “emotional suffering”, Reddy's term for the distress that arises when individuals cannot reconcile their own feelings and goals with socially mandated patterns of expression. An important criterion for evaluating historical regimes is thus the degree of “emotional liberty” they afford – the extent to which people can reorient their projects and relationships without intolerable inner conflict.

In prior centuries and across cultures, there have been strict courtly regimes of tightly regulated expression of emotion

Reddy develops these concepts through a detailed reconstruction of France between 1700 and 1850. In chapters 5–7 he argues that, under the absolute monarchy, courtly codes of honour and deference formed a relatively strict regime that tightly regulated how subjects could express anger, loyalty, or affection toward the king, lovers, and one another. This configuration, he suggests, created incentives for courtiers and provincial elites to seek what he calls “emotional refuges” – alternative settings such as salons or literary circles in which they could pursue more expansive sentimental ideals without directly confronting the constraints of court society.

According to Reddy's analysis as presented by later commentators, the French Revolution can be understood as both a political and an emotion regime crisis. The prerevolutionary “sentimentalist” regime, nourished by literature and philosophy that prized sincerity and transparent feeling, encouraged actors to treat intense sympathy and virtue as markers of political authenticity. In this context, revolutionary leaders came to demand visible proofs of love for the patrie and hatred of its enemies; doubts about others’ sincerity escalated into spirals of suspicion. Reddy reads the Jacobin Terror as a moment when the sentimentalist regime's own norms of intense, publicly displayed feeling helped generate the very emotional suffering – fear, anxiety, and guilt – that undermined its stability.

After the fall of Robespierre, Reddy sees a shift toward a more sceptical post-sentimental configuration, visible in the Directory and Napoleonic periods, in which overt displays of feeling in politics were treated with suspicion and more weight was placed on self-control and calculation. Yet, in his view, this new regime did not simply suppress feeling; rather, it redirected intense passions into reconfigured “emotional refuges” in private life and culture. The subsequent settlement that Reddy labels “liberal reason, romantic passions” – with its combination of constitutional politics and Romantic ideals of inward depth – is interpreted as a regime that offered somewhat greater emotional liberty, while still generating characteristic tensions between public restraint and private intensity.

Through these French cases Reddy seeks to demonstrate that changes in political order are closely entangled with shifts in permissible feeling, available vocabularies of self-description, and the institutions that channel affective life. His narrative also illustrates how internal contradictions within a regime – for example between demands for sincerity and the impossibility of fully transparent feeling in revolutionary politics – can contribute to regime breakdown and the emergence of new norms of feeling.

Frevert and the cultures of feeling in modern Europe

Ute Frevert extends this kind of analysis beyond a single national case, offering a macro-historical account of how norms of feeling developed in Europe from the early modern period to the twentieth century. In Writing the History of Emotions she speaks of “emotional cultures”, by which she means historically specific constellations of valued and disapproved feelings, patterns of expression, and institutionalised expectations in different social fields. Rather than positing a single, linear progression, she emphasises how state formation, capitalist economies, gender orders, and international politics generated multiple, intersecting cultures of feeling that can be analysed in terms of regimes of feeling.

One central theme in Frevert's work is the role of honour as a key node in European regimes of feeling. In her studies of “practising honour”, she shows how aristocratic and later bourgeois codes required men in particular to display readiness to use violence to defend status, while simultaneously subjecting such conduct to legal and moral regulation. Honour thus acted as a dynamic mediating point of shared expectations, linking and transforming both inner dispositions (courage, sensitivity to insult) and outward practices (duelling, courtroom testimony, military discipline). Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Frevert traces how these honour cultures were reshaped by the expansion of state institutions and public spheres, producing new expectations about shame, respectability, and self-control.

Frevert also analyses how emerging capitalist orders were accompanied by distinctive “emotional economies”, a canonical term in her work for the patterned ways in which feelings such as greed, trust, and happiness were bound to market structures and moral judgements. In chapters on “Capitalist Cold?” and on money and happiness, she argues that nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates over the supposed coldness of markets, the proper place of compassion in economic life, and the pursuit of happiness as a measure of well-being reflected attempts to stabilise new regimes of feeling appropriate to capitalist societies.

In her discussion of “emotional politics”, Frevert examines how European rulers and political movements in the long nineteenth century sought to cultivate loyalty, love, and trust among citizens. Monarchies and later nation-states developed repertoires of symbols, ceremonies, and narratives intended to produce affective attachment to the polity, including the portrayal of monarchs as caring paternal figures and the dramatisation of national suffering and sacrifice. These practices can be understood as elements of emotion regimes insofar as they prescribed appropriate ways of feeling about rulers, fellow citizens, and enemies, and linked those expectations to institutional routines such as schooling, conscription, and commemoration.

Frevert's work thus complements Reddy's French focus by showing how, across different European societies, regimes of feeling co-evolved with changing configurations of power, law, and economy. Her analyses underscore that shifts in norms of obedience, pride, discipline, and empathy were not merely “cultural” epiphenomena but integral to the consolidation and contestation of modern political and social orders.

Regime formation and transformation across eras

Taken together, Reddy's and Frevert's studies, as surveyed by Jan Plamper, offer a set of general observations about how emotion regimes arise and change. Plamper summarises Reddy's definition of an “emotional regime” as the ensemble of prescribed emotives and the rituals that sustain them, noting that Reddy's historical chapters demonstrate how such ensembles are anchored in specific institutional settings – courts, revolutionary assemblies, bureaucracies – and supported by explicit and implicit norms of feeling. Frevert, in turn, highlights how armies, legal systems, markets, and international relations have each generated their own characteristic expectations about fear, courage, shame, empathy, and other key feelings.

Both authors show that new regimes typically crystallise under conditions of significant reorganisation of power. For Reddy, the emergence of a sentimentalist regime in eighteenth-century France is tied to the spread of new literary forms, sociability, and political ideas that elevated sincerity and pity as civic virtues; this configuration was then tested and partly undone by the Revolution and its aftermath. For Frevert, the formation of modern European states involved the deliberate crafting of “emotional politics” that bound citizens to institutions through cultivated trust, love of the nation, and justified fear of external enemies.

Reddy's notion of “emotional suffering” is central to understanding how regimes may be destabilised. When the demands of a regime repeatedly force individuals into conflicts between mandated display and felt experience, they may seek alternative scripts and settings – the “emotional refuges” he identifies – in which other ways of feeling become thinkable. Revolutionary crises thus appear, in his account, not only as clashes of interests and ideas but also as moments when previously dominant regimes of feeling become untenable for large numbers of people.

Changes in vocabularies of feeling are another indicator of regime transformation. The collective project Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling 1700–2000 surveys encyclopedias and dictionaries in German, English, and French to show how terms for feelings have been defined, grouped, and revalued over three centuries. Frevert's discussion of this work emphasises that shifts from “passions” and “affections” to “emotions” as central psychological categories, and the emergence or decline of particular feeling-words, track broader changes in how authorities, experts, and lay publics conceptualise inner life. From the perspective of emotion regimes, such lexical changes both reflect and help constitute new accepted ways of feeling within a community, by codifying which experiences are named, stigmatised, or encouraged.

Plamper's synthetic account underlines that historians differ in how far they treat regimes of feeling as coherent structures or as loose clusters of norms, but he argues that Reddy's French case and the Max Planck group's lexicon studies demonstrate the heuristic value of tracing how prescribed feeling-rules, institutional practices, and vocabularies shift together over time. In this view, regime formation and transformation can be studied through converging evidence from political events, social practices, and language.

Illustrative examples beyond France

Literature and art form templates for emotional conduct. Specific examples include the 18th century sentamentalist works such as The Barber of Seville (play) but includes diverse forms such as opera, cinema and painting.

While Reddy's analysis focuses on France, Frevert's research and the Emotional Lexicons project provide examples of emotion regimes in other European contexts. In her work on honour, Frevert traces how Prussia and other German states cultivated specific ideals of masculine bravery, self-control, and readiness to fight, especially among officers and educated citizens. Military institutions, courts, and codes of etiquette together prescribed when anger, indignation, or shame were appropriate, and when they had to be restrained; breaches could result in both legal sanctions and loss of status. These patterns can be interpreted as elements of regimes of feeling that linked individual self-respect to service of the state.

Frevert's chapter on “Emotional Politics in Europe’s Long Nineteenth Century” offers another set of examples. She shows how constitutional monarchies and later parliamentary regimes developed repertoires of commemorations, public ceremonies, and visual symbols designed to elicit loyalty and affection from citizens, and how oppositional movements sought in turn to mobilise indignation, resentment, or hope. Across countries, rulers and parties experimented with different combinations of paternal care, patriotic exaltation, and controlled fear of internal and external enemies, contributing to distinct national patterns of political feeling that can be described in terms of differing emotion regimes.

The Emotional Lexicons volume extends the geographical range by analysing changes in feeling vocabularies in German, English, and French reference works from 1700 to 2000. By comparing entries on concepts such as anger, fear, sympathy, or stress across languages and periods, the contributors show how some feelings were newly named, subdivided, or linked to medical and psychological expertise, while others receded from authoritative discourse. These findings suggest that different national and linguistic communities participated in partially shared, partially divergent regimes of feeling, as changes in state structures, religious authority, and scientific knowledge influenced which forms of inner life were codified and evaluated.

Finally, Frevert's studies of twentieth-century Europe, including work on postwar Germany, highlight how contrasting political systems generated differing expectations about enthusiasm, fear, and solidarity. She argues that democratic and authoritarian regimes alike relied on structured appeals to feeling – for example, calls to mourn war dead, to celebrate economic achievements, or to fear ideological enemies – but did so through distinct institutional channels and accepted patterns for how feelings should be expressed. These examples underline that emotion regimes are not confined to a single country or era: they are a recurrent feature of how European societies have organised and contested norms of feeling over time.

Institutional and Social Emotion Regimes

Family Systems and Intimate Norms

The mid-twentieth-century white suburban family ideal depicted by the radio-television Nelson family illustrated how domestic roles and routines shaped shared expectations of emotional expression, guiding how family members learned, managed, and displayed feelings within the broader emotion regime of postwar America.

Families constitute some of the most enduring environments in which norms of feeling and expression are learned. Within households, expectations surrounding anger, shame, pride, affection, and restraint form a patterned framework that guides early socialisation. Thomas Scheff's microsociological account describes how the “deference–emotion system” shapes intimate bonds: family members continually monitor signs of acceptance or rejection, and threats to these bonds generate acute responses linked to shame and pride. Scheff emphasises that embarrassment and shame arise whenever legitimacy within the relationship is jeopardised, while the experience of being recognised appropriately fosters pride and solidarity. Such dynamics create a climate of expectations about which feelings are acceptable, guiding children in what may be expressed and what must be contained.

Barbara Rosenwein's concept of *emotional communities*—groups whose members share norms about valued emotions, styles of expression, and interpretive assumptions—provides a complementary framework for analysing households as carriers of feeling norms (first-use gloss). Rosenwein notes that emotional communities are structured by “fundamental assumptions, values, goals, feeling rules, and accepted modes of expression,” and they may exist as overlapping circles of more intimate subgroups. Under this view, family systems can be understood as small-scale emotional communities that cultivate specific repertoires of feeling. The combination of Scheff's bonding mechanisms and Rosenwein's group-level analysis highlights how intimate norms become durable components of an emotion regime.

Organizations and Professional Expectations

Organisational settings impose distinctive expectations regarding comportment and feeling. Arlie Hochschild's analysis of service work introduces the idea of *feeling rules*—shared standards used to determine what is “rightly owed” in contexts of interaction—and shows how workers engage in “emotion management” to meet these expectations. Hochschild's ethnography of flight attendants documents techniques intended to align inner states with organisational demands, including reframing passengers as “personal guests” and using memory-based strategies akin to method acting. These practices illustrate how workplaces structure the standard emotional responses employees are trained to display through training regimes and evaluative procedures.

Organisations not only prescribe desirable feelings such as warmth or calmness but also enforce constraints against irritation, fear, or aggression. Hochschild argues that the costs of such management include the risk of alienation from one's own affective life when professional expectations conflict with spontaneous responses. Professional fields also vary: service work typically requires sustained positive display, while roles involving enforcement or collection encourage the cultivation of more confrontational repertoires. These contrasts underscore how organisational emotion regimes differ by occupation, training system, and sector.

Erving Goffman's account of ritual interaction further clarifies how institutional order is sustained. Goffman's analysis highlights the centrality of “face,” the ongoing mutual effort to maintain legitimacy within encounters, and shows that anticipating embarrassment is a key motivator shaping conduct. Because workplaces involve dense, repeated interactions, employees learn routinised ways of avoiding embarrassment, signalling deference, and interpreting subtle cues of approval or disapproval. Such ritual structures complement Hochschild's account by showing how organisational expectations are embedded in everyday interactional routines.

Identity-Based Social Emotion Regimes

Identity groups—whether structured around gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or shared cultural practices—develop distinctive patterns of feeling that differentiate them from surrounding contexts. R. W. Connell's framework of multiple masculinities demonstrates how emotional expectations vary within gender orders: hegemonic masculinities emphasise control, toughness, and the management of vulnerability; subordinated and marginalised masculinities organise feeling through alternative repertoires shaped by power relations and embodied practice. These patterned expectations function as emotion regimes insofar as they prescribe appropriate affective orientations and sanction deviations.

Rosenwein's analysis of emotional communities also extends to identity-based groups. Because each community is characterised by a constellation of valued feelings and interpretive norms, identity groups can be viewed as overlapping emotional communities whose members share repertoires of pride, vigilance, restraint, solidarity, or dignity. The analytic emphasis lies not on contemporary movements but on the structural insight that communities articulate norms governing which feelings should be cultivated and how they ought to be expressed.

Solidarity graffiti mural in Warsaw, 1989. Promoting emotions associated with solidarity are often crucial for maintaining group cohesion to constrain factional forces in a movement.

Jeff Goodwin, James Jasper, and Francesca Polletta's work on social movements shows how identity groups mobilise distinctive patterns of feeling they call repertoires—such as anger, fear, outrage, or hope—to reinforce boundaries and sustain collective engagement. The term "repertoires of contention" is used by writers such as Charles Tilly while others describe it as movement “dramaturgy” which typically refers to distinctive forms of emotion management to maintain group cohesion and interpret threats. These processes illustrate how identity-based emotion regimes operate by articulating the feelings a group holds up as appropriate for members.

Religious and Secular Emotion Regimes

Religious settings have extensively structured shared patterns of feeling shaped through ritual, doctrine, and communal practice. Rosenwein's framework shows how monastic, ecclesiastical, and lay communities cultivated constellations of valued feelings and modes of expression, forming distinctive emotional communities grounded in shared theological and moral understandings. Such communities prescribed appropriate orientations—devotion, humility, fear, compassion—and regulated how these feelings should be expressed in ritual and everyday conduct. Because emotional communities are characterised by linked assumptions, goals, and feeling rules, religious traditions often stabilised durable repertoires that guided members’ relational expectations and interpretive habits.

Monique Scheer's work demonstrates that secular institutions generate institutionally shaped patterns of feeling analogous in analytic form to those found in religious groups. In her account of “secular embodiments,” Scheer argues that norms governing affective comportment are embedded in embodied practices, spaces, and classificatory schemes that guide how people feel and perceive in secular contexts. These expectations operate through techniques of bodily discipline, sensory ordering, and ritualised routines that normalise particular affective orientations. Scheer's practice-theoretical approach emphasises that neither religious nor secular feeling norms should be understood as static systems; rather, they are continually produced and sustained through embodied actions. This perspective clarifies how secular institutions—schools, bureaucracies, civic organisations—constitute emotion regimes by organising the practices through which affective dispositions are cultivated.

Subcultural and Associational Emotion Regimes

Subcultures, clubs, activist groups, and other voluntary associations often maintain distinctive repertoires of feeling that sustain group identity and solidarity. Rosenwein's model suggests that such formations can be conceptualised as emotional communities whose boundaries are defined by shared assumptions, valued emotions, and norms of expression. These repertoires differentiate members from surrounding groups and provide interpretive frameworks for assessing events, relationships, and obligations.

Academic study of social movements by Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta illustrates how associational groups cultivate emotion norms that reinforce commitment and collective orientation. Their analysis demonstrates that “emotion management” occurs at the collective level: groups promote shared feeling rules, deploy dramaturgical practices, and structure interactions in ways that heighten solidarity and shape responses to risk or conflict. Movement repertoires thus function as emotion regimes by prescribing how members ought to feel toward allies, opponents, and the group's goals. These repertoires include cultivated orientations such as moral outrage, hope, or collective fear, each contributing to the maintenance of group boundaries and the activation of mobilisation processes. Subcultural and associational settings therefore exemplify how emotion regimes emerge in small-scale formations through shared practices, collective narratives, and patterned expectations.

Political Emotion Regimes

National Emotion Regimes

Writers in the field who analyse nation-states through the lens of emotion regimes emphasise how political communities organise attachments, loyalties and anxieties around the category of national belonging. Sociologist Mabel Berezin argues that modern nation-states act as “vehicles of political emotion”, transforming citizenship from a formal status into a “felt identity” through practices that cultivate patriotism and nationalism, define friends and enemies, and generate “love for the nation” and a sense of fraternity among citizens. In this view, national emotion regimes are the patterned expectations that link being a citizen with particular ways of feeling pride, obligation or hostility.

Berezin situates national identification within a “hierarchy of felt identity”, in which some collective affiliations acquire the status of “hypergoods” that command especially intense attachment. Nation-states work to secure such a privileged position for national belonging by constructing national cultures against local or regional ones and by building a material and institutional infrastructure—schools, standardized languages, rituals, monuments—through which citizens learn to experience themselves as members of a national community. Wars of unification and state-building in the nineteenth century, for example, helped to make national identity salient among competing loyalties, binding individuals affectively to the state and providing a framework in which conflicts over inclusion and exclusion were understood.

Historical work on what Ute Frevert calls “emotional politics” in Europe's “long nineteenth century” shows how such national emotion regimes were stabilised through appeals to love, honour and fraternity. Frevert describes how revolutionary and post-revolutionary actors in France mobilised fraternity as a political bond, imagining the nation as a “band of brothers” and enacting this kinship through embodied practices such as walking arm in arm and public embraces. These practices aimed to remake citizens’ sentiments so that political judgement became guided by a rapid, quasi-instinctive sense of what was “morally” or politically right, with emotions doing the work of directing opinions and sustaining democratic commitments. Taken together, such analyses portray national emotion regimes as historically contingent arrangements in which states and political elites cultivate specific repertoires of pride, love, honour and solidarity in order to secure legitimacy and organise the boundaries of national membership.

Populist Emotion Regimes

Populist movements rely on distinctive repertoires of feeling that define “the people” and their antagonists through patterned expectations of resentment, betrayal, righteous anger, and solidarity. Analysts of social movements highlight how political action is sustained not only by ideas or grievances but by affective orientations that circulate among participants and are reinforced through collective practices. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta note that emotional responses such as anger, fear, and a sense of betrayal play a decisive role in mobilization, shaping whether individuals join movements and how they interpret political opportunities. These emotions create readiness for action, making some actors more willing to engage in protest while discouraging others.

Populist organizing often depends on intensifying these feelings of threat and grievance. Goodwin and colleagues describe how narratives of injustice, loss, or danger can galvanize potential supporters when they are paired with affective affiliations—to symbols, leaders, and imagined communities—that render action meaningful. Movements also draw upon what the authors call “emotion cultures,” reshaping broader public sensibilities to normalize repertoires such as indignation or rage. Historical cases show how earlier mobilizations, including Black nationalist movements in the United States, left a legacy of “politics of rage” that later movements could adopt or adapt.

At the same time, internal dynamics of populist groups require forms of affective regulation. Goodwin and Pfaff observe that maintaining loyalty and dedication often involves emotion management—cultivating pride and enthusiasm while managing fear or ambivalence. These practices form a coherent populist emotion regime by establishing norms for expressing anger at elites, affirming group cohesion, and sustaining a sense of righteous struggle.

Lauren Berlant's analysis of contemporary politics provides a complementary lens by showing how populist formations emerge from conditions of affective impasse—situations in which established norms and expectations no longer provide orientation. Berlant describes the contemporary present as structured by crisis and uncertainty, producing a search for clarity and attachment amid the “waning of genre” and the destabilization of established ways of making sense of the world. In such conditions, populist actors can articulate compelling narratives that convert diffuse anxieties into political resentment and promise a restoration of agency or belonging. Berlant's account helps explain why contradictory attachments—what she terms “cruel optimism”—can flourish in populist settings, as supporters cling to political promises that cannot be fulfilled yet remain affectively compelling.

Taken together, these analyses show that populist emotion regimes organize political life through patterned expressions of grievance and hope. They mobilize supporters by cultivating indignation toward perceived enemies, forging solidarity within “the people,” and sustaining engagement through narratives that resonate with widespread feelings of insecurity and loss.

Authoritarian and Fascist Affective Orders

Hitler Youth performing the Nazi salute during state-organised ritual, illustrating how fascist authorities cultivated disciplined displays of loyalty and trained young people to associate mandated emotional expression with national belonging.

Authoritarian and fascist systems exemplify political orders in which regimes attempt to structure patterns of obedience, loyalty, and hostility through sustained affective practices. Berezin's study of interwar Italy demonstrates how fascist authorities sought to reshape public life by embedding political meaning in ritual action. Fascist public spectacle, which she describes as the “expressive crucible” of identity, was designed to produce a community of feeling in which Italians would experience themselves as fascists through repeated participation in schools, party organizations, and mass events. These rituals aimed to fuse individual and collective identities by generating familiarity with fascist symbols, synchronizing participants’ gestures, and creating shared memories of collective presence.

Rituals played a central role in stabilizing authoritarian affective orders. Berezin shows that fascist parades and commemorations functioned as arenas of identity formation, where repeated actions cultivated sensations of solidarity—“we are all here together”—and produced a sense of belonging that transcended everyday social divisions. At the same time, the regime constructed exemplary figures—the fascist “heroes”—whose obituary biographies modelled virtues of bravery, stoicism, discipline, and obedience. These narratives prescribed how ideal fascist subjects ought to act and feel, linking civic and military duty to readiness, steadfastness, and loyalty.

Yet Berezin also notes that the identities fostered by fascist cultural policy were fragile. Decades of schooling and spectacle did not produce a deeply rooted fascist self, and these identities collapsed rapidly when the regime fell, suggesting the limits of authoritarian affective control.

Aho's analysis of enemy construction complements this account by identifying how authoritarian movements rely on hostility to unify supporters. He argues that societies create enemies as objects onto which fears and grievances are projected, and that this process serves to bind groups together by providing a shared target for aggression. The construction of the enemy is therefore central to authoritarian affective orders: it generates a sense of threat, justifies coercion, and channels collective anger toward outsiders or internal opponents.

Appadurai's work further illuminates how authoritarian and proto-fascist formations mobilize fear and anxiety to police identity boundaries. His analysis of “predatory identities” shows how movements such as Nazism defined national belonging by constructing minorities as dangers to the wholeness of the nation. This dynamic is intensified through what he calls the “narcissism of minor differences,” where small cultural distinctions can provoke disproportionate hostility and lead to violent purification projects. Such affective mechanisms of fear and rage help consolidate authoritarian power by framing violence and exclusion as necessary acts of protection.

Taken together, these academics reveal how authoritarian and fascist affective orders operate not simply through coercion but through sustained efforts to orchestrate feeling—cultivating obedience and pride, staging rituals that model ideal forms of belonging, and constructing enemies whose perceived threat legitimates the regime's power.

Political Backlash and Counter-Regimes

Periods of political transition often produce competing structures of feeling as groups respond to perceived losses of status, security, or moral orientation. Appadurai argues that modern nation-states are marked by an “anxiety of incompleteness,” a pervasive sense that national identity is fragile and vulnerable to internal or external threats. This anxiety can intensify during social or political change, generating backlash movements that reinterpret uncertainty as evidence of minority danger or elite betrayal. When boundaries between “us” and “them” blur, small cultural distinctions can be magnified into sources of rage—what Appadurai terms the “narcissism of minor differences.” These dynamics can crystallize counter-regimes: collective efforts to reassert threatened hierarchies of belonging through hostility, exclusion, or violence.

Backlash movements also mobilize highly patterned repertoires of feeling. Goodwin, Jasper, and Polletta show that indignation, moral outrage, and fear are central to how groups interpret political developments and decide whether to engage in collective action. Such emotions provide interpretive frameworks that explain perceived losses and identify responsible actors. When existing political authorities are seen as abandoning or undermining valued identities, these repertoires can harden into oppositional structures of feeling that challenge the legitimacy of the dominant order.

Berlant's account of contemporary political life helps illuminate why crises often activate such counter-regimes. She describes the present as structured by affective “impasse,” a condition in which established norms no longer guide action or aspiration. In these moments, contradictory attachments and frustrated expectations can become politically volatile. Backlash movements harness these uncertainties by offering simplified narratives that promise moral clarity, restored agency, or renewed belonging. Berlant's concept of “cruel optimism”—attachments to promises that cannot be fulfilled yet remain affectively compelling—clarifies how such narratives maintain their appeal even when their solutions prove unattainable.

Hostility also plays an important role in the formation of counter-regimes. Aho shows that groups often construct enemies as repositories for diffuse anxieties and grievances, allowing participants to externalize fears and unify around a shared target. Such enemy construction can escalate during political transitions, when uncertainty encourages the search for agents responsible for disruption. These practices both reflect and reinforce emerging counter-regimes, as norms governing fear, resentment, and solidarity are reorganized in opposition to the dominant political order.

Together, these perspectives show how political backlash develops affective coherence by reshaping public norms of fear, resentment, and belonging. Counter-regimes emerge when groups collectively reinterpret insecurity as injustice, identify enemies who threaten the imagined community, and articulate alternative structures of feeling meant to restore order or hierarchy.

Techniques of Affective Governance

Political institutions do not simply respond to public feeling; they actively organise and direct it through patterned techniques of governance. Berezin's account of the “secure state” highlights how modern governments rely on affective strategies to cultivate legitimacy, manage uncertainty, and bind citizens to national projects. She shows that states facing crises of security—whether geopolitical, economic, or cultural—seek to generate public confidence and loyalty by embedding political messages in symbols, rituals, and communicative practices that make the state appear protective and cohesive. Such techniques create structured expectations about how citizens ought to feel in relation to authority, belonging, and threat.

A central mechanism of affective governance involves public ritual and commemoration. Berezin's earlier research on fascist Italy demonstrates how authoritarian governments used repeated public events to reshape hierarchies of identity and produce a felt sense of unity. Ritual action synchronised bodies, generated familiarity with political symbols, and produced collective memories that naturalised state authority. Even beyond authoritarian settings, similar logics apply: commemorations, national anniversaries, and ceremonial performances work to stabilise the polity by linking citizenship to pride, mourning, or solidarity.

Affective governance also operates through the management of fear and insecurity. Appadurai suggests that nation-states and political actors can mobilise anxieties about incompleteness, cultural threat, or minority danger to consolidate authority. He argues that feelings of uncertainty—particularly in contexts where identity boundaries appear porous—make publics more receptive to narratives that frame violence, exclusion, or illiberal policies as necessary for protection. These strategies direct diffuse fears toward targeted objects, thereby transforming insecurity into a source of political cohesion.

Berlant's analysis of crisis further clarifies how states intervene in affective life. She describes contemporary publics as living through conditions of ongoing “impasse,” in which the familiar structures of feelings that helped people orient themselves falter and individuals struggle to orient themselves. In such contexts, state messaging, media campaigns, and political rhetoric can provide simplified affective anchors—moralised narratives of threat and rescue, promises of restored stability, or symbolic gestures of care. These interventions function as techniques for managing uncertainty and channelling attachments in ways that sustain political order.

Finally, affective governance includes the production and regulation of enemies. Aho demonstrates that identifying and narrating enemies helps unify publics by externalising danger and consolidating in-group solidarity. By naming threats, assigning blame, and constructing hostile categories, political authorities help generate the emotional conditions—anger, apprehension, vigilance—that justify expanded power and restrictive policies. This mechanism can stabilise regimes during crises, even as it intensifies social divisions.

Taken together, these analyses show how affective governance encompasses a repertoire of techniques—including ritual, commemoration, propaganda, crisis narration, and enemy construction—through which political authorities attempt to regulate public feeling. These practices do not merely reflect political structures; they help produce and sustain them by shaping how citizens experience security, belonging, and threat.

Digital Emotion Regimes

One conceptual model of platform interaction highlighting how social media systems steer users toward emotionally resonant storytelling that fuels engagement and reinforces emergent digital affective orders.

Algorithmic Affective Infrastructures

Digital platforms rely on algorithmic systems that sort, rank, and render information visible, thereby structuring the conditions under which users appear, circulate, and participate online. Taina Bucher argues that algorithms operate as mechanisms of selection that “make decisions, sort, and make meaningfully visible” data, raising fundamental questions about who or what determines the conditions of visibility in networked environments . Such infrastructures shape what can be perceived and known, establishing patterned expectations about presence, relevance, and responsiveness.

Platform architectures intensify these effects by organizing visibility in uneven and contingent ways. The software environments in which users act are designed to make things “visible and knowable in a specific way” . On Facebook, for example, the governing force is not constant observation but a “threat of invisibility”: users confront a scarcity of visibility and must orient their conduct to the platform's embedded logic to appear at all . This dynamic helps produce distinct norms of attention and interaction, as the system prioritizes some actors and activities over others.

Algorithmic power, in this context, exceeds the technical instructions that drive ranking or recommendation. Drawing on a broadly Foucauldian understanding, Bucher shows that algorithmic systems constitute an “ensemble of strategies” that help produce certain forms of acting and knowing . These systems generate orientations, anticipations, and interpretive habits that shape how users navigate digitally mediated environments.

Bucher terms the interpretive framework that emerges from these encounters the “algorithmic imaginary.” Algorithms “seize the social imaginary through the various affective encounters of which they are part,” generating “different experiences, moods, and sensations” . The algorithmic imaginary consists of the ways people imagine what algorithms are, how they work, and what kinds of possibilities or risks they entail . These imaginaries arise from habitual participation in algorithmically mediated spaces and help explain why users interpret algorithmic decisions as consequential for their sense of visibility, recognition, and situated agency.

Papacharissi's account of “affective publics” complements this perspective by showing how digitally mediated publics emerge not through stable norms but through the circulation of shared sentiment. Rather than forming coherent ideological communities, affective publics coalesce around unfolding events, producing temporary alignments that are held together by connective storytelling and ambient expressions of feeling . These dynamics highlight how algorithmically mediated environments do not simply distribute information but facilitate the emergence of fluid, sentiment-driven publics whose coherence depends on the affective patterns generated through networked communication .

Influencer Economies and Affective Labor

Influencer cultures operate within visibility-driven environments in which personal presentation, mediated intimacy, and audience engagement are structured by platform architectures and market expectations. Illouz argues that digital environments extend the commodification of intimacy, as users cultivate self-presentations shaped by therapeutic discourse and market-oriented norms of self-realization . Online self-branding amplifies these dynamics, since platforms encourage forms of ontological self-presentation in which visibility, emotional expressiveness, and responsiveness become key components of self-making .

Banet-Weiser shows that these dynamics are embedded in a wider “economy of visibility,” in which contemporary cultures of empowerment depend on producing content that circulates across media platforms . Within this economy, self-branding becomes an expected practice, linked to highly individualized discourses of self-confidence, body positivity, and personal achievement . Such norms help establish the affective expectations that govern influencer cultures, where visibility, relatability, and positivity are often required for participation and success.

Abidin demonstrates that influencers work simultaneously within an attention economy and an “economy of affect,” in which cultivating emotional connection with audiences is as important as attracting views or clicks . Platform metrics—likes, comments, and follower counts—serve as quantifiable indicators of this affective performance and strongly shape how influencers craft content. As platforms increasingly conflate attention with affection, influencers must balance short-term visibility spikes with the long-term cultivation of audience loyalty through ongoing interaction and displays of sincerity .

This labor is continuous and often intensive. Influencers must monitor performance across multiple platforms, document engagement metrics, and produce a steady stream of posts to maintain relevance, a process Abidin describes as a demanding form of visibility labor . At the same time, influencers rely on what Abidin calls “calibrated amateurism”: a carefully managed aesthetic of spontaneity and informality that cultivates a sense of authenticity and relatability for followers . These norms guide how influencers perform, how audiences interpret their performances, and how both groups co-produce the affective expectations that define influencer cultures.

Taken together, these analyses show that influencer economies are structured by patterned norms of affective labor: practices that require the continual production, modulation, and commodification of feelings in pursuit of visibility, recognition, and perceived authenticity.

As Banet-Weiser and Miltner note, women who achieve heightened visibility online often confront a structurally patterned hostility, with networked misogyny emerging as a recurrent response to the very forms of self-presentation and empowerment that influencer cultures encourage .

Toxic Subcultures, Networked Hostility, and Affective Contagion

Trolling as a method of signaling shared identity as well as establishing and reinforcing collectively held emotions

Certain online subcultures develop patterned norms of hostility that function as exclusionary emotion regimes, organizing participation through practices of provocation, ridicule, and antagonism. Whitney Phillips shows that trolling is not random disruption but a recognizable cultural formation structured by shared strategies and expectations. Trolls operate according to norms that guide their conduct, enact transgressive performances, and target others to generate reactions that reinforce group identity . Central to these practices is the pursuit of “lulz,” a mode of pleasure rooted in the discomfort or humiliation of others, which Phillips identifies as a defining logic of troll culture . These performances often escalate through affective spirals, as hostile reactions circulate and intensify within and beyond the originating group . Irony serves as an important discursive tool, allowing participants to distance themselves from harm by framing attacks as jokes, even as the effects of harassment remain consequential . These formations resemble what Papacharissi terms affective publics: collectivities that congeal around circulating sentiment, including antagonistic or hostile affect, rather than coherent ideological commitments .

These dynamics are reinforced by collective coordination, with trolls frequently acting together to amplify the scale and impact of targeted attacks . Hostility also functions as an internal boundary-making device: communities police their norms through derision and targeted harassment, using exclusionary practices to establish who belongs and who does not . Platform infrastructures further enable these forms of antagonism. Systems organized around visibility and amplification reward content that provokes strong reactions, creating conditions under which coordinated harassment and hostile subcultures can flourish .

Gendered forms of hostility represent a significant dimension of these digital regimes. Banet-Weiser and Miltner characterize “networked misogyny” as a structural force in online environments, rather than an anomaly or the product of individual deviance . They argue that highly visible women, particularly those associated with feminist politics, encounter patterned hostility intensified by the affordances and cultures of digital platforms . These responses often combine resentment, antagonism, and gendered derision, and are amplified through technical infrastructures that facilitate rapid circulation and escalation . Such hostility is also unevenly distributed: women of color disproportionately become targets of racialized and gendered harassment, reflecting broader social inequalities reproduced in digital contexts .

Banet-Weiser's broader analysis of popular misogyny underscores how these patterns are embedded in cultural structures that normalize hostility toward women. She argues that misogyny “folds into state and national structures with terrible efficiency,” making antagonism toward feminist visibility both predictable and systemically reinforced . Together, these accounts show how digital subcultures coordinate antagonistic performances, how hostility circulates and intensifies through platform infrastructures, and how misogyny operates as a recurring pattern within online environments.

Image Circulation, Digital Witnessing, and Affective Publics

Digital images play a central role in shaping how networked publics perceive and respond to violence, injustice, and political struggle. Kari Andén-Papadopoulos shows that activist image making in the Arab uprisings involved “citizen camera-witnessing,” a set of embodied practices through which protesters used cameras to assert political presence and reclaim representational power from authoritarian regimes . Filming demonstrations became a means of transforming participants from subjects of repression into agents capable of documenting state violence and articulating collective demands . As eyewitness images circulated across digital platforms, they mobilized transnational publics and provided visual documentation of political struggle, even as their interpretation remained shaped by structural inequalities in global media systems .

Papacharissi conceptualizes these forms of circulation as the work of “affective publics,” collectivities that arise through shared, event-driven sentiment rather than through stable organizational norms. In her view, digital witnessing generates connective storytelling that enables dispersed individuals to link personal reactions with broader narratives of injustice or resistance . Such publics are fluid and episodic, forming around moments of heightened visibility and dissolving as events recede. Their coherence derives from affective intensities—outrage, solidarity, grief—that circulate through platforms and structure how participants interpret unfolding events .

These practices also generated highly visible, affectively charged communicative forms. Activist videos recorded during protests or conflict documented suffering and atrocity, becoming key materials for human rights work and for forming publics oriented around witnessing and accountability . The production, circulation, and archiving of such images became a terrain where activists, journalists, and institutions negotiated the meaning and value of evidence. Grassroots videographers increasingly found their work incorporated into what Andén-Papadopoulos calls a post-2011 “image-as-forensic-evidence” economy, wherein videos were assessed, preserved, and repurposed according to evidentiary standards established by international justice actors .

Platform infrastructures strongly condition these dynamics. YouTube's introduction of automated machine-learning deletion systems in 2017 led to the removal of hundreds of thousands of Syria-related videos, erasing critical material and reshaping what forms of witnessing remain publicly accessible . Activists emphasized the vulnerability created by these systems, noting both the absence of meaningful communication with platform operators and the structural dependence—what Kazansky terms “forced reliance”—on commercial platforms that simultaneously provide visibility and expose users to sudden loss of archives . Platform moderation, then, regulates the affective visibility of political events by determining which images circulate, which are suppressed, and how publics encounter evidence of violence.

These struggles over circulation intersect with deep emotional and political commitments. Record-keeping itself carries “highly charged” significance for videographers, who often understand documentation as a form of resistance to erasure and as a means of sustaining the history of movements that face state repression . Several Syrian participants described the act of filming as essential to maintaining the possibility of justice and collective memory, framing cessation of documentation as a symbolic capitulation . In this sense, affective publics illustrate how digital witnessing not only records events but organizes collective feeling around them, shaping how publics emerge, mobilize, and dissipate . Taken together, these analyses show how digital witnessing involves not only the production of images but also their uneven circulation through infrastructures that shape publics, govern visibility, and embed political struggle within the affective landscape of contemporary media.

Platform Governance as Affective Governance

Digital platforms govern online environments not only through explicit rules but also through the infrastructural conditions that organize visibility, circulation, and participation. Bucher argues that algorithms function as mechanisms of governance by determining what becomes perceptible in the first place, as they “make decisions, sort, and make meaningfully visible” information, thereby establishing the conditions under which users appear to one another . Algorithmic power operates as an “ensemble of strategies” that shapes how people act and what kinds of knowledge practices become possible on platforms . These processes are rooted in platform architectures that allocate visibility unevenly: the “im/material” spaces of software make things visible “in a specific way,” and the dominant force shaping user conduct is the “threat of invisibility,” as visibility itself becomes scarce and contingent upon alignment with platform logics .

Because governance is embedded in technical infrastructures, it is also experienced affectively. Algorithms “seize the social imaginary through various affective encounters,” generating moods and sensations that shape how users interpret platform power . The algorithmic imaginary—how people imagine and respond to algorithmic forces—thus frames governance not simply as policy enforcement but as a lived orientation to opaque systems that constrain participation.

Phillips demonstrates how these infrastructural dynamics intersect with moderation practices to shape hostile or antagonistic climates. Platform architectures, which reward intensity and attention, create conditions in which trolling and harassment thrive, generating feedback loops between user behavior and governance intervention . Efforts to regulate antagonism often prompt new forms of evasion: trolls respond to moderation by adapting their strategies, producing boundary-making dynamics in which platform rules and user practices co-construct norms of hostility . Irony functions as a discursive shield that enables harmful speech to persist despite policy restrictions, complicating the moral and practical work of moderation .

These governance challenges are intensified in cases of gendered hostility. Banet-Weiser and Miltner identify “networked misogyny” as a structural phenomenon linked to the cultures and affordances of platforms, which facilitate the rapid circulation and amplification of hostile content . Women—particularly women of color—are disproportionately exposed to these forms of harassment because platform infrastructures mediate visibility in ways that reproduce offline inequalities . Banet-Weiser further argues that misogyny is deeply embedded in broader cultural structures, making antagonism toward visible feminist expression both predictable and systemically reinforced . These patterns shape how platforms design safety policies, evaluate harmful content, and attempt to cultivate civility.

Taken together, these analyses show that platform governance operates as a form of affective governance: it structures how users appear, how hostility circulates, and how different groups experience vulnerability or protection. Through algorithmic filtering, content moderation, and policy enforcement, platforms help constitute the emotional climate of digital publics—whether by amplifying outrage, prioritizing civility, sanitizing distress, or unevenly distributing exposure to harm.

Gendered and Racialized Digital Emotion Regimes

Antifeminist demonstrators in Warsaw using extremist imagery, reflecting how gendered hostility becomes organized, circulated, and intensified through networked affective dynamics.

Patterns of visibility, vulnerability, and hostility in digital environments are distributed unevenly across gendered and racialized lines. Banet-Weiser and Miltner show that networked misogyny is not an incidental by-product of online interaction but a structural formation embedded in the technological, social, and economic infrastructures of platforms . Hostile responses to feminist or female-coded visibility—such as those directed at participants in the #MasculinitySoFragile debate—demonstrate how antagonism becomes a predictable reaction, shaped both by platform affordances and by cultural narratives surrounding gender and power . The origins of this debate, which included explicit reference to racialized violence against Black men, also reveal how gendered discourses online are intertwined with racialized injury and affective vulnerability .

Banet-Weiser's broader account of popular misogyny further underscores the systemic nature of these dynamics. She argues that misogyny circulates as a “networked structure,” linking disparate groups and discourses across platforms through shared vocabularies of injury, entitlement, and hostility . Terms such as “incel,” “negging,” and “Men Going Their Own Way” form a linguistic repertoire that consolidates gendered hierarchies and legitimizes antagonistic interaction . This networked system of misogyny intensifies the risks associated with visibility for women and girls, who often encounter harassment, denigration, and racialized or sexualized hostility when they participate in public digital spaces. Popular feminism's emphasis on visibility becomes fraught in this context, as increased visibility can generate both recognition and intensified backlash .

These dynamics are particularly pronounced in youth-oriented digital practices. Banet-Weiser describes how YouTube genres such as “Am I Pretty?” videos expose girls to a climate of judgment and potential bullying, in which self-presentation is evaluated through norms that fuse popularity, appearance, and vulnerability . The affective expectations embedded in these practices—confidence, self-esteem, resilience—are unevenly distributed, with girls disproportionately subjected to scrutiny and potential harm.

Racialized inequalities also shape how digital publics form and circulate. Andén-Papadopoulos notes that visibility in global media systems is structured unevenly, with Western journalistic frameworks exerting strong control over the interpretation of eyewitness imagery from marginalized regions . These inequalities are compounded by platform governance: automated content moderation disproportionately harms marginalized users, such as Syrian videographers whose documentation of violence was inadvertently erased by algorithmic deletion systems . Such uneven exposure to vulnerability demonstrates how digital infrastructures reproduce broader social hierarchies, embedding racialized and gendered differences into the affective conditions of online participation.

Taken together, these analyses show that gendered and racialized digital emotion regimes organize who is seen, who is heard, and who becomes a target of hostility. They highlight how platform infrastructures, visibility cultures, and patterned antagonisms shape unequal affective expectations across different communities in networked environments.

Related Terms

A range of analytic concepts in the history and sociology of emotions address how norms, expectations, and shared practices structure feeling within social formations. These terms—developed in different scholarly traditions—often overlap in subject matter while emphasizing distinct aspects of affective life. The notion of an emotion regime focuses on prescriptive expectations that organize how people ought to feel and express themselves within a social order. Although first elaborated through macro-historical cases, the framework is scalable and can describe patterned norms in a variety of settings, from states and institutions to professions, movements, and subcultural groups.

Other concepts in the field highlight different dimensions of affective organization. Emotional communities emphasize shared interpretive habits and valued repertoires of feeling within particular groups. Feeling rules and emotion work illuminate the situational expectations that guide everyday expression. Approaches such as affective economies and emotional capitalism trace patterns of circulation and accumulation, or the intertwining of affect with economic and cultural logics. Studies of affective publics examine how digital infrastructures shape collective expression, while research on social movements identifies the emotional repertoires that support solidarity, mobilization, and meaning-making.

These related terms map complementary domains of inquiry rather than mutually exclusive categories. Together they illustrate the diverse ways scholars have analyzed how affect is shaped, structured, and negotiated across different scales and contexts. The subsections below outline the distinctive emphases and usages associated with each concept and clarify how they relate to the analytic vocabulary of emotion regimes.

Emotion Regimes and Emotional Communities

Scholars commonly distinguish William Reddy's notion of an emotion regime from Barbara Rosenwein's concept of emotional communities, not because the two frameworks are mutually exclusive, but because each highlights different scales and emphases in the study of patterned feeling. Rosenwein defines emotional communities as groups whose members share characteristic norms for evaluating and expressing feelings—vocabularies, interpretive habits, and valued dispositions that shape how situations are understood and responded to within the group . Her work underscores plurality: any society contains multiple communities, each cultivating its own repertoire of expected feelings and sanctioned expressions .

Reddy's account of emotion regimes focuses on the prescriptive structures that organize feeling across a social order. An emotion regime is a configuration of obligatory emotives—forms of expression that simultaneously describe and help produce feelings—together with the institutionalized practices through which these conventions are reinforced . Although many of Reddy's historical examples concern political systems and state authority, the underlying conceptual apparatus is scalable. Emotion regimes may be found in nation-states and political systems (macro), in organisations and professional settings (meso), and in movements, subcultures, or other collectivities (micro to meso) whenever norms of affect are prescriptive, socially enforced, and tied to shared expectations about appropriate conduct .

The distinction between the two terms therefore lies in emphasis rather than categorical separation. Emotional communities describe the shared repertoires and interpretive practices of particular groups. Emotion regimes refer to structured normative orders—sometimes broad, sometimes local—that cultivate, reward, and regulate specific forms of feeling. While community emphasises diversity within a social landscape, regime highlights the degree of prescription and the ways in which expectations of feeling shape action and constrain emotional possibility . Both concepts illuminate how people learn to feel within normative settings; they simply bring different facets of this process into focus.

Emotion Regimes and Feeling Rules / Emotion Work

Arlie Hochschild's concepts of feeling rules and emotion work describe the socially patterned expectations that guide which feelings individuals should experience or display in particular situations. Feeling rules constitute “the side of ideology that deals with emotion and feeling,” indicating what one “ought to” or has the “right to” feel in a given context . Individuals perform emotion work when they attempt to shape their affect in accordance with these expectations . Such expectations operate at many levels—across families, workplaces, professions, and social classes—where they differ according to gender, task, and role .

Organizations may also institutionalize feeling rules. In *The Managed Heart*, Hochschild shows how employers in service industries train workers to display prescribed affects such as cheerfulness, embedding these expectations in occupational routines . These patterns illustrate that feeling rules, while rooted in situated interactions, can also take on durable and organized forms.

Reddy's framework of emotion regimes provides a broader vocabulary for describing structured expectations that organize feeling within a social order. His historical studies show how dominant conventions—such as the courtly order of *politesse* or later sentimental conventions—shaped expression and conduct during the French Revolution . The concept, however, is not limited to political systems. Emotion regimes can characterize institutions, organizations, movements, and other collectivities whenever expectations of feeling are prescriptive, socially reinforced, and tied to shared practices . When mandatory emotives restrict individuals’ room for self-revision, they may contribute to emotional suffering .

Rather than marking a strict boundary, the two terms foreground different analytic angles. Feeling rules draw attention to the fine-grained regulation of affect in roles, interactions, and occupations. Emotion regimes highlight configurations of normative expectation that may span multiple scales and settings. Both approaches illuminate how affective expectations are structured, maintained, and navigated.

Emotion Regimes and Affective Economies / Emotional Capitalism

Sara Ahmed, leading theorist of affect whose work illuminates how emotions circulate through communities, shaping norms, attachments, and the politics of belonging.

Sara Ahmed’s formulation of affective economies examines how feelings circulate between signs, bodies, and objects, accumulating value through repetition rather than residing within individuals . This circulation can produce “sticky signs,” whose affective charge intensifies as histories of association accumulate, shaping attachments, aversions, and collective orientations . Ahmed's approach therefore highlights motion, accumulation, and relationality—tracing how affect condenses around particular objects or groups and contributes to the formation of collectivities.

Eva Illouz's account of emotional capitalism provides another vantage point. As summarized by recent historiography, capitalist institutions and cultural practices reorganize emotional life, identifying, naming, and managing affect in ways that transform aspirations, anxieties, and social relations . In this usage, emotional capitalism describes how economic rationalities and emotional expectations become intertwined across multiple settings .

Reddy's concept of an emotion regime can be applied alongside these approaches. Whereas affective economies emphasize circulation and attachment, and emotional capitalism foregrounds historically specific entanglements of markets and affect, the notion of an emotion regime draws attention to prescriptive expectations—formal or informal—that specify how individuals ought to feel within a social order. Such regimes may operate at the scale of political systems, but they may also characterize organizations, professions, movements, and subcultures whenever affective norms are articulated, cultivated, and socially reinforced .

These frameworks thus illuminate different facets of affective life: one traces movement, one examines economic entanglement, and one highlights patterned expectations. Their usage depends on the dimension of affective organization under consideration rather than on fixed boundaries between them.

Emotion Regimes and Affective Publics

Zizi Papacharissi’s concept of affective publics describes collectivities that emerge through digitally mediated expression. These publics form as individuals share affective intensities—indignation, concern, solidarity—through networked platforms, producing loose yet consequential alignments shaped by connective storytelling, ambient flows of updates, and the viral circulation of sentiment . Their coherence depends less on stable group membership than on the rhythms and contours of communication afforded by digital infrastructures, which allow affect to gather around events, hashtags, or moments of heightened visibility . In this framework, collective feeling takes shape through ongoing expression rather than through formal rules or codified expectations.

Papacharissi emphasizes that affective publics materialize through the affordances of platforms—featuring “always-on” streams of content and modalities that connect dispersed participants into emergent formations . These publics demonstrate how digital environments organize affective life by structuring visibility, circulation, and interaction, not by specifying how individuals ought to feel. Their formation thus highlights the fluid, event-oriented, and communicative dynamics characteristic of contemporary networked settings .

Reddy's notion of an emotion regime can be considered alongside this perspective. Emotion regimes draw attention to patterned expectations—formal or informal—that guide how individuals should feel and express themselves within a social formation. These expectations may be found at many scales, from political orders to organizations, professions, or digital communities, wherever norms of expression are cultivated and socially reinforced . In digital contexts, the patterned styles of expression characteristic of platformed discourse, as well as the recurring affective orientations that cluster around themes or publics, may be described in terms of a regime when persistent norms of acceptable or valued expression take shape.

Rather than establishing a categorical division, the comparison highlights different emphases. The concept of affective publics foregrounds emergence, circulation, and communicative intensity in digitally mediated environments. The concept of an emotion regime highlights the structuring of affective expectations, whether in states, institutions, movements, or online settings. Both approaches illuminate how digital communication shapes affective life, with the former focusing on dynamics of formation and the latter on patterns of normativity.

Emotion Regimes and Affective Governance / Platform Governance

Scholarship on digital platforms often examines how infrastructures, moderation systems, and computational processes shape the environment in which expression circulates. Tarleton Gillespie’s analysis of platform governance shows that content moderation entails ongoing processes of decision-making, negotiation, and revision, as platforms determine what becomes visible, legitimate, or suppressed within their systems . Visibility itself functions as a form of governance, insofar as platforms effectively decide which participants “count” in the production of public discourse . Moderation is distributed across specialized teams whose activities influence broader knowledge and value structures , while opportunities for user participation in shaping these rules remain limited .

Taina Bucher's work highlights how algorithmic systems organize affective life by shaping what users encounter, how often, and in what order. The engineering of participation through ranking, filtering, and personalization produces distinct “affective landscapes” in which forms of attention and responsiveness are cultivated . This perspective emphasizes how platforms structure the terrain of interaction rather than prescribing specific emotional norms.

Reddy's concept of an emotion regime may be considered alongside these approaches. Emotion regimes describe patterns of expected feeling and expression that are socially reinforced within a given setting. Such regimes may operate within political systems, but they can also characterize organizations, communities, professions, or digitally mediated spaces whenever affective expectations become patterned and collectively recognized . In digital environments, recurring styles of participation, shared assumptions about appropriate expression, or enduring orientations toward particular issues may be described as components of a regime when they function as socially anchored expectations.

Rather than delineating mutually exclusive domains, the comparison illustrates different analytic orientations. Research on affective or platform governance foregrounds the mechanisms—technical, administrative, and infrastructural—through which platforms structure possibilities for expression and interaction. The concept of an emotion regime highlights the patterns of normative expectation that take shape within such environments, whether emergent, institutionally reinforced, or collectively sustained. Using these terms together allows scholars to describe both the organization of communicative settings and the affective expectations that arise within them.

Emotion Regimes and Social-Movement Emotion Cultures

The 1967 “Summer of Love” ushered in a shift towards an subculture emotion regime based on reciprocal emotions.

Research on social movements shows how collective action is shaped by distinctive repertoires of feeling. Editors of Passionate Politics distinguish between reciprocal emotions—affective ties of friendship, loyalty, and solidarity among participants—and shared emotions such as collective anger or outrage directed at external actors . These forms of feeling reinforce one another, providing the cultural and motivational grounding for protest and sustaining continued participation . Recruitment itself often depends on affective ties, as social networks carry expectations of liking, trust, and obligation .

Social movements also cultivate emotionally charged narratives, metaphors, and symbols that structure meaning and solidarity. Anne Kane's work shows that emotional meanings are organized through interpretive frameworks embedded in cultural and historical contexts . Researchers have noted that community-organizing models associated with Saul Alinsky rely on humour, ridicule, and dramatized indignation to build solidarity and encourage collective agency, demonstrating how affective repertoires function as practical tools of mobilisation as well as elements of a movement's emotional culture. Michael Young's analysis of moral shock highlights how intense reactive feelings can resonate with enduring commitments and motivate political engagement . High-risk activism frequently involves processes that help participants manage fear, such as rituals and collective identities that foster courage and continuity .

These features illustrate how movements generate affective cultures that shape interpretation, action, and belonging. Such cultures may also exhibit prescriptive or expectation-setting qualities—whether through shared norms of indignation, narratives valorizing courage, or practices that discipline members’ emotional styles. In this sense, a movement's emotional formation can resemble an emotion regime when norms are articulated, cultivated, and socially reinforced . At the same time, the analytic lens of movement emotion cultures draws particular attention to expressive repertoires, solidarity-building practices, and the dynamic rechanneling of emotions in moments of contestation. Colin Barker’s account of the Polish Solidarity strike, in which fear shifted rapidly to pride and derisive laughter, illustrates how movements can intensify and redirect affect to enable collective action .

Rather than establishing hard boundaries between these terms, the comparison highlights different emphases. The concept of a social-movement emotion culture foregrounds expressive, relational, and mobilizing dimensions of collective feeling, while the concept of an emotion regime directs attention to the patterned expectations that structure affect across a social formation—whether in states, institutions, organizations, or movements.

Using “Emotion Regime” Alongside Related Terms

The concept of an emotion regime provides a vocabulary for describing patterned expectations about feeling and expression across a wide range of social settings. Although the term was first elaborated through historical cases involving states and political orders, its analytic reach is broader: scholars may use it to discuss the structuring of affect within institutions, professions, movements, families, or digital environments whenever norms of feeling become recognizable, cultivated, or socially reinforced. In this sense, emotion regimes can be identified at multiple scales, from national formations to meso-level organizations and micro-level collectivities.

The related terms surveyed in this section highlight different facets of affective life. Emotional communities foreground shared interpretive repertoires and valued feelings within particular groups. Feeling rules and emotion work draw attention to the situational and role-based expectations that guide everyday conduct. Affective economies and emotional capitalism emphasize circulation, accumulation, and the entanglement of affect with economic and cultural logics. Accounts of affective publics examine how digital infrastructures shape the emergence and flow of collective expression, while research on social movements identifies the repertoires, solidarities, and practices through which activists create emotionally meaningful worlds.

These concepts do not define separate or competing domains. Instead, each offers a distinct angle on how feeling is organized, experienced, and negotiated. Emotion regimes contribute to this landscape by describing the normative patterns that structure affect across different contexts and scales. Taken together, these frameworks provide complementary tools for analysing the diverse ways that social formations shape the expectations, interpretations, and practices through which people learn to feel.

References

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