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Citizenship Studies
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The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama

Carol Johnson
a a

School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5005, Australia Published online: 27 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Carol Johnson (2010) The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama, Citizenship Studies, 14:5, 495-509, DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2010.506702 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2010.506702

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Citizenship Studies Vol. 14, No. 5, October 2010, 495509

The politics of affective citizenship: from Blair to Obama

Carol Johnson*
School of History and Politics, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA 5005, Australia (Received 26 September 2009; nal version received 12 December 2009)

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Politicians have long mobilised emotion in order to gain voters support. However, this article argues that the politics of affect is also implicated in how citizens identities, rights and entitlements are constructed. Examples are drawn from the positions of UK, US, Canadian and Australian politicians, including Tony Blair, David Cameron, Kevin Rudd and Barack Obama. Emotions analysed include love, fear, anxiety, empathy and hope. The article argues for the importance of a concept of affective citizenship which explores (a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains. It focuses on issues of sexuality, gender, race and religion, and argues that the politics of affect has major implications for determining who has full citizenship rights. The Global Financial Crisis has also seen the development of an emotional regime in which issues of economic security are increasingly inuencing constructions of citizenship. Keywords: citizenship; politics; affect; sexuality/sexual orientation; race; identity

Introduction The last few years have seen an increasing literature on the Politics of Affect.1 It is widely accepted that emotion has been a signicantly under-researched area in political studies (Barbalet 2006, p. 32, Redlawsk 2006, p. 1). This is surprising given that the power of emotions has long been acknowledged by political theorists ranging from Aristotle to Burke (Robin 2004, p. 81, Charteris-Black 2005, p. 11). Emotion has also been a key eld of study in closely related elds. Demertzis (2006, p. 103) comments that it is strange to think that the political sociology of emotions is quite immature when compared with the enormous growth of the sociology of emotion over the last 25 years. Indeed, some of that sociological research is highly relevant to the arguments developed here (e.g. Fortier 2008). Much of the recent literature on politics and emotion have focused on politicians use of emotion to mobilise electoral support. Westen (2007, p. 125) claims unequivocally that the data from political science are crystal clear: people vote for the candidate who elicits the right feelings. Similarly, Redlawsk (2006, p. 10) draws on opinion poll and neurophysiological research to argue that politics is about feeling every bit as much as it is about thinking. This article also focuses on politicians and emotion. It takes the fact that politicians regularly use emotion to try to gain the interest and support of the electorate as a given. However, it pursues a different approach by focusing on how politicians use of affect interconnects with the way in which citizenship is constructed

*Email: carol.johnson@adelaide.edu.au
ISSN 1362-1025 print/ISSN 1469-3593 online q 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13621025.2010.506702 http://www.informaworld.com

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and citizens are governed (including via citizens self-governing their emotions). The concept of affective citizenship is used to explore (a) which intimate emotional relationships between citizens are endorsed and recognised by governments in personal life and (b) how citizens are also encouraged to feel about others and themselves in broader, more public domains. It is argued that both these aspects inuence how citizenship is constructed, impacting on conceptions of citizens identity, their rights and entitlements. Such constructions of citizenship in turn reect different emotional regimes, to adapt a term of Reddys (2001, p. 62), in the form of particular ideals and strategies that an individual is meant to adhere to, and the emotions (towards themselves and others) that they are expected to feel. The term affective citizenship is not new. Jones (2005, p. 145) uses the term to refer to the affection and loyalty which citizens are encouraged to feel about their nation. Mookherjee (2005, p. 36) uses the term, in the context of French debates over the Muslim wearing of headscarves, to argue for the need for governments to acknowledge the emotional relations through which identities are formed. This article builds on both those meanings but the broad concept of affective citizenship used here emphasises that the recognition and encouragement of emotions has long been part of the very way in which citizenship itself is constructed. The article particularly focuses on the interactions between affective citizenship and issues of gender, race/ethnicity, religion and sexuality, as well as issues of economic security. Key examples from political debate are used to illustrate some of the ways in which the interaction of affect with social power relations can inuence constructions of citizen identity and entitlements, and involve different emotional regimes. Given that this article already covers a wide range of issues, it was decided to limit the analysis to (predominantly) English-speaking politicians. Consequently, the article draws on examples from the UK, US, Australia and Canada. Using examples from four countries demonstrates the cross-country relevance of issues of affective citizenship, while acknowledging the impact of local political circumstances. The resulting analysis illustrates the variety of emotional regimes involved, in different historical circumstances and locations, as well as their contested nature. Given the existing scope, broader approaches regarding the origins and nature of emotions also could not be pursued. These include insights from psychosocial approaches (see e.g. Clarke et al. 2006) and neuroscience (see e.g. McDermott 2007). Rather, this article focuses on politicians use of specic feelings such as love, empathy, anxiety, security, fear and hope. It merely seeks to analyse particular aspects of the politics of affect, related to politicians and citizenship, thereby complementing research that uses other approaches in a eld where much work remains to be done. The article begins by establishing that emotion has long played a role in constructing conceptions of citizen identity. Conceptions of intimate affective couple and familial relationships inuenced how citizen identity and citizen entitlements were originally constructed. Current political debates over issues ranging from same-sex marriage to the recognition of indigenous family relations are then analysed to reveal an ongoing relationship between the recognition of intimate emotional relationships and particular constructions of citizen identity and entitlements. The analysis then moves from the discussion of those personal emotions to a discussion of the emotions that politicians encourage citizens to feel about themselves and others in more public domains. Finally, the article concludes by exploring some of the implications of previous arguments about the role of affect, particularly empathy, in the conceptions of the good citizen.

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Intimate emotions: personal life and the construction of the affective citizen Feminists have long pointed out (Moller Okin 1979, Pateman 1988) that the traditional liberal western citizen was constructed in gendered terms as a married male head of household. That conception of citizenship also had affective underpinnings. First, one of the justications for denying women citizenship in their own right was that women were seen to be too emotional, therefore less rational than men, and properly conned to private, family life (Lloyd 1984). Second, despite the emphasis on the males ability to be a rational citizen in public life, it was also recognised that his role as a head of household involved personal emotional commitments. Indeed, from the eighteenth century on, marriage was increasingly constructed, including in law and politics, as a relationship between affective individuals and the household was correspondingly constructed as a caring, loving family.2 So, the unit around which citizenship was constructed always had signicant affective components, despite the apparent focus on rationality.3 Giddens (1992, p. 195) has gone so far as to argue that the emphasis on intimacy between individuals eventually facilitated more equitable gender relationships and was thereby implicated in the development of western democracy. Giddens may have a point given the history of inter-connected justications for family forms and forms of government. Developments in personal life potentially challenged traditional arguments that lines of formal authority owed downwards from feudal monarchs ruling over their subjects to male heads of household ruling over their wives and families (Peters 2004, pp. 94 95, 201). Povinelli has argued that Giddens analysis is also relevant to western interventions in colonial settler societies. She claims that the intimate couple is a key transfer point of liberal forms of power in the contemporary world, including being seen as constitutive of western civilisation (Povinelli 2006, pp. 4, 17). Consequently, other forms of kinship relations, which did not centre on an intimate couple and nuclear family, could be constructed as inferior and as justifying colonial government interventions. Furthermore, as Stoler (2002, pp. 112 139; 41 78) has documented, intimate feelings became an important site of governance and self-governance in colonial societies, particularly in regard to issues around the care of children or sexual relations. In short, affect, intimacy, citizenship and governance have long been intertwined. This history is sometimes overlooked by those who imply that morally conservative views, which downsize citizenship to construct the sphere of private life as the core context of politics (Berlant 1997, p. 3), are a relatively new phenomenon. Rather, such family values conservatives are harking back to older conceptions of citizenship. Even if one does not see such intimate relationships as being as pivotal as Giddens does, affective relationships still clearly play a role in how citizenship is constructed. Plummer (2003, pp. 67 84) has argued that forms of doing intimacy, for example around more diverse forms of family life and sexuality, are integral to new, highly contested, forms of citizenship. The emphasis here will be on how forms of intimacy, in turn, involve particular forms of emotion. Specic emotions are recognised and approved of, while others are not, in different emotional regimes constructed around issues of sexuality and family relations. For example, traditionally the intimate couple being constructed as the basis of citizenship entitlements was heterosexual. The initial design of welfare policies assumed that women and children would be dependent upon a male wage earner (Pateman 1996, pp. 13 17). The serious implications that had for same-sex couples have been analysed in the literature on sexual citizenship (Bell and Binnie 2000, Richardson 2000, Phelan 2001) and heteronormative citizenship (Johnson 2002). Forms of heteronormative citizenship are also forms of affective citizenship. As Kirby (2005, p. 31) notes: Same-sex relationships

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were the outward manifestation of impermissible emotions and that is one reason why such emotions, or at least the physical acts that gave them expression, were criminal in many countries. Homosexuality may now have been decriminalised in the western world but there is clearly an ongoing political struggle over whether the affective intimate couple is constructed as heterosexual. Conservative politicians such as George W. Bush (2004), Canadas Stephen Harper (2005) and Australias John Howard (2004) have argued that marriage is an exclusively heterosexual institution. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Australias Kevin Rudd also agree that marriage should be heterosexual, although they advocate various other forms of legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Not surprisingly, given the previous arguments regarding how the unit of citizenship is constructed, issues of marriage and legal recognition of same-sex relationships have major implications for citizens entitlements. There are over 1000 federal rights associated with marriage in the USA, ranging from social security to employment benets that have been denied to same-sex couples (Kotluski 2004, pp. 56 57). In Australia, the failure to recognise same-sex relationships as equivalent to heterosexual de facto ones prior to 2008, resulted in over 50 major pieces of discriminatory legislation. These ranged from welfare benets, superannuation and immigration to taxation law (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 2007; Commonwealth of Australia 2008d, pp. 6686 6699). The loving family of parents and children was also traditionally constructed in heterosexual terms, and there are consequently ongoing debates over recognition of same-sex familial relationships in many jurisdictions (e.g. Rayside 2008, pp. 167 220; Commonwealth of Australia 2008c, pp. 5931 5998; 12 November 2008, pp. 82 84). Once again, recognition has implications for family benets. In short, sexuality provides an excellent example of how the recognition and endorsement of emotions such as sexual and parental love inuences how citizen entitlements are constructed. It also reveals the heteronormative nature of traditional sexual emotional regimes that are still being challenged today. So, in many parts of the West, same-sex couples (and their families) still have not made the leap to being constructed as loving, affective individuals that in Britain, for example, was made in the eighteenth century for heterosexuals. This in turn has had implications for whether gays and lesbians are seen as eligible for citizen entitlements. The foregoing analysis, therefore, adds an additional, affective component, to Kaplans argument (1997, p. 3) that the achievement of equality for lesbian and gay citizens is part of the unnished business of modern democracy and to Phelans (2001, p. 5) argument that lesbians and gay men are not currently citizens in the full political sense in countries such as the USA. In short, the identity and entitlements of the citizen were shaped by heterosexual emotional norms. Given the foregoing analysis, it is also not surprising that more recent arguments in favour of recognition of same-sex relationships are often based on constructing same-sex couples as affective individuals in loving relationships equivalent to heterosexual ones (see e.g. Smith 2003, Blair 2005). If public recognition of emotions such as love is implicated in constructions of citizenship entitlements, then such recognition needs to be engaged with, despite the normalising consequences rightly identied by queer theorists (see e.g. Valverde 2006). However, gender and sexuality are only two of the social power relations that have inuenced which intimate personal emotions are recognised by the state. (Needless to say, individuals often have multiple identities in which factors such as race, gender, religion and sexuality intersect.) Current contestations around love, marriage and relationship recognition in the west are largely around issues of sexuality. Yet, even four decades ago

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in the USA there would have been debates about race. There are also racialised emotional regimes that are relevant to issues of how citizenship is constructed. Several US states had banned mixed race marriages until they were overridden by a 1960s Supreme Court decision with the Court subsequently asserting that the right to marry is one of the basic civil rights of man [sic] (Gerstmann 2004, p. 200). Emotional attachments between couples and families were constructed in racialised ways. Members of marginalised races were dehumanised in a complex interaction between the denial of full citizenship rights and the non-recognition of, or lack of empathy for, particular emotions. For example, the denial of the love between indigenous parents and their children contributed to both the stolen generations of Aboriginal children taken from their parents in Australia until the 1970s, and the over 150,000 Canadian aboriginal children separated from their families to be placed in Indian residential schools. Both the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper made formal apologies for these acts in 2008. Rudd acknowledges the past failure to recognise emotional attachments in Aboriginal families as equivalent to those of colonial settler Australians:
The pain is searing . . . . The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault . . . on our most elemental humanity . . . . I ask those non-indigenous Australians . . . who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. (Commonwealth of Australia 2008a, p. 169)

Harper (2008) also acknowledged the lack of empathy for others feelings in a dehumanizing system that destroyed the fabric of family in rst nations and made parents and children feel worthless. However, taking indigenous children from their families is just one of the more recent instances in a very long history of the emotions of non-white families not being recognised. For example, the US House of Representatives (2008) apology for slavery, acknowledged that the brutal treatment of slaves included families being torn apart after having been sold separately from one another. Signicantly, the above statements do not just involve an apology for past wrongs, they also signal the development of more racially inclusive conceptions of citizenship rights and entitlements. As part of that process, the intimate emotional relationships of indigenous and African American families are being publicly accorded the same status as those of the white families around which western conceptions of the unit of citizenship were originally constructed. The appeals to family feeling are not just being used by politicians as an emotive trope that can engender empathy among whites who have reservations about indigenous rights. The argument here is that, given the signicance which the family plays as a unit of citizenship, the appeals to family feeling also signify a broader, more racially inclusive, extension of the citizen unit and citizen rights. There has been a shift in racialised emotional regimes in terms of whose emotions are being recognised as legitimate and who it is legitimate for socially powerful racial groups to feel empathy for (see further Johnson 2005). Nonetheless, just as sexual contestations are ongoing in constructions of the unit of affective citizenship, so are contestations over race and ethnicity. The previous Australian government steadfastly refused to apologise to stolen indigenous children (Commonwealth of Australia 2008b, p. 6158). Hancock (2004) has analysed how previous US governments mobilised the Politics of Disgust against African American single mothers, depicting them as bad mothers and welfare queens. Furthermore, whether couple and familial emotional relationships are adequately recognised still has implications for who is let into countries as potential citizens. Hillary Clinton (2007) argued that US laws were tearing

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legal immigrant families apart as permanent residents waited many years for their spouses and children to get permission to join them. In other words, ongoing gender and racial issues over who is constructed as a legitimate loving family still have implications for conceptions of citizens rights and entitlements. (It will be interesting to see the impact of having an African-American rst family in the USA.) Such examples already suggest that affective citizenship does not just involve whether intimate emotions, such as those within couples or families, are recognised or endorsed. Affective citizenship also involves which emotions citizens are encouraged to feel about themselves and others in more public contexts. Public emotions and the construction of the good citizen Intimate emotions within couples or families are often the subject of public debate as the controversies over apologies to indigenous families or over same-sex marriage make clear. Personal emotions are also evident in relations within communities, as Fortiers (2008) analysis of multicultural intimacies reveals. Here, as elsewhere, there is not a clear demarcation between the private and the public (cf. Miller and Rose 2008, p. 19). However, the analysis in the following section will move beyond focusing on analyses of intimate emotions, in couple or family contexts, to analyse the link between constructions of citizenship and the broader, more public, emotions that good citizens are encouraged to feel towards themselves and others. It will be argued that this is also an important way in which citizens are governed and in which emotional regimes are constituted. The examples used come from recent British and US political debate and cover issues ranging from issues of integration and social inclusion to issues of economic security. Once again, issues of affect will be seen to play a signicant role in how conceptions of citizenship, including views of the good citizen, are constructed. Affective citizenship in British political debate The rhetorical mobilisation of affect by political leaders was advocated as far back as Aristotle (Charteris-Black 2005, p. 11). There is a particularly long history of fear being mobilised (Robin 2004, Bourke 2005). Nonetheless, commentators such as Berlant (2005, pp. 47, 48, 51) have argued that the mobilisation of a fearful affective public has become particularly prominent during the past century (partly assisted by the development of mass communications technologies). Similarly, Isin (2004, p. 217) has analysed a strategy of governing through neurosis in which the neurotic citizen is encouraged to have a number of anxieties, including about the Other (Isin 2004, p. 217). While Bigos (2002, p. 63) analysis of the Governmentality of Unease draws attention to the ways in which migration is increasingly interpreted as a security problem. Fear of the migrant other is common in contemporary emotional regimes. There are certainly examples of these forms of governance in recent British political debates. Anxieties about increasing Islamic immigration, in particular, have become key issues in the politics of affect. Even before the London bombings by home grown terrorists, then Prime Minister Tony Blair had argued that government should address the publics feelings of anxiety about Muslim immigration. He claimed that while the vast bulk of the British people are not racist . . . . they expect government to respond to their worries (Blair 2004). Those worries included not just an anxiety about terrorism but also a fear that British national identity was being undermined by groups who became citizens but rejected traditional British values and culture (Blair 2004). In short, both the identity and the security of the British citizen were at stake.

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It became increasingly clear that Blairs arguments both had particular implications for some British Muslims and had implications for the politics of affect. Blair privileged the emotions of particular groups when constructing the national identity of good British citizens. He not merely asserted the right of mainstream Britons to feel concerned but also suggested that minority groups needed to ensure that mainstream Britons did not feel uncomfortable. When asked do you think it is possible for a woman who wears the veil to make a full contribution to British society?, Blair replied:
That is a very difcult question. It is a mark of separation . . . it makes other people from outside of the community feel uncomfortable [emphasis added]. No-one wants to say that people dont have the right to do it . . . But . . . we do need . . . to confront this issue about how we integrate people properly. (Blair 2006)

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Anne-Marie Fortier (2008, pp. 15, 96) has argued that the veil row . . . is part of an ongoing systematisation of a disciplining gaze. It constructs distinctions between the moderate and the fanatic and between those who are willing and those who are unwilling to reassure fellow nationals by making them feel comfortable (see further Ahmed 2004, pp. 132 133, Butler 2004, pp. 47 49, Khiabany and Williamson 2008). Clearly the debate involved issues of whose feelings were being privileged and legitimised. The emotion of a woman who feels uncomfortable not wearing a veil is subordinated to the (unquestioned) right of other Britons to feel uncomfortable around women wearing veils. Mainstream Britons are clearly the focus of empathy in a way that marginalised Britons are not. Furthermore, as Fortier points out, affect becomes implicated in the very construction of ethnic and national identities:
the prescription of sentiment of feelings for the nation, for the community, for the neighbour, for the Muslim, for the suicide bomber, for minorities is also what race and ethnicity are about . . . . the very act of naming who and how to love, suspect, befriend, care for, embrace, welcome, and so on, performatively constructs racial, ethnic, cultural and national differences along with their gender, sexual, class, and generational identities. (Fortier 2008, p. 89)

Those emotions and identities are also implicated in the constructions of citizen identity. In other words, the good citizen both feels and performs particular emotions. Fortier (2008, p. 98) notes that, especially since the London bombings, the internal states of some citizens have become of great concern to politicians and public servants, and in public debate. Feelings of supposed loyalty or alienation experienced by Muslim citizens have become of particular concern. The politicians statements are a form of normalising discourse that encourages both forms of self-government by some citizens and forms of casual surveillance by those who feel they belong. So, citizens are expected to demonstrate that they feel loyal, patriotic and integrated. Those citizens are to be welcomed. People who are suspected of not having the correct feelings, including those accused of making a point of their difference (for example, by wearing a veil, or even preferring to speak a foreign language), are problematised and identied as legitimate subjects for critique, fear or suspicion. Particular identity categories are thereby constructed and reinforced, and there is pressure on minorities to change both the behaviour and the performance of affect. In Foucauldian terms, it is an additional form of governmentality attempting to shape and fashion the conduct of persons (Miller and Rose 2008, p. 19). So, for example, Fortier (2010) provides a detailed analysis of how British government strategies for fostering community cohesion involve forms of governing through affect by attempting to inuence citizens feelings about the community they live in.

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Similarly, the current British leader of the opposition, David Cameron (2007, 2008), has identied a form of emotional pathology in the British body politic. Britons do not feel sufciently British. They do not perform their national identity by displaying their attachment to values, the national ag and other icons, like Americans do. Cameron is particularly concerned about how British Muslims feel.
31% of all Muslims . . . feel they have more in common with Muslims in other countries than they do with non-Muslims in Britain. This cannot be explained simply in terms of the bonds of kinship which anyone will feel to the homeland of their ancestors. There is something deeper . . . . A feeling of alienation. . . . It is now absolutely vital that we address this trend . . . . those who feel simply disillusioned and disaffected today can turn to something much more sinister . . . tomorrow. (Cameron 2007)

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Prime Minister Gordon Brown (2006) made similar comments regarding integration and displaying patriotism. Nonetheless, in Camerons view, it is not just the ordinary citizen (and particularly the Muslim citizen) who is not feeling sufciently British, the condition has spread to the top:
Gordon Browns view of Britishness is mechanical, not organic, its something to be redesigned, repackaged and relaunched by Whitehall, not something which lives in our hearts . . . . What the Prime Ministers response lacks is the emotional connection with the institutions that dene Britishness. (Cameron 2008)

In other words, Cameron argues that Brown is neither feeling nor encouraging the right emotions. However, the emotions that are seen to be crucial can change in response to the particular anxieties of the electorate. Browns alleged emotional coldness is apparently seen by the Conservatives as a generalised archilles heel which Cameron, who projects himself as a new age man more comfortable with emotion, hopes to address. As the Global Financial Crisis deepened, voters became increasingly concerned about issues of economic security. By October 2008 The Independent was reporting that Tory strategists believe Mr Brown lacks the emotional intelligence and empathy to persuade the public he is on their side as the recession bites (Grice 2008, p. 9). Yet, arguably Browns bailing out of the British banks and his massive economic stimulus packages were designed not just to avoid nancial meltdown but also to make voters feel more economically secure. Conceptions of the good affective citizen are changing in the Global Financial Crisis. Neo-liberal conceptions of the citizen as someone who should feel entrepreneurial and self-reliant (see e.g. Corner and Harvey 1991, pp. 1 21) have been increasingly contested by welfare liberal conceptions of a citizen who is encouraged to feel protected by government when buffeted by economic circumstances beyond their control.4 Barack Obamas discourse provides a particularly good example of this form of affective citizenship, thereby reecting a change in the political economy of US emotional regimes. He also provides a very different example of how race and affect can intersect with conceptions of citizenship. Affective citizenship and Barack Obamas politics of emotion Mobilising emotion not only played a prominent part in Barack Obamas campaign for the US presidency a concern with emotion is integral to his conception of what a good citizen, citizen entitlements and American national identity should be. Obamas campaign promised an alternative politics of emotion to the conservative Republican one. Berlant (2005, p. 73) has argued that under Bush the US political sphere had been saturated by the deployment of emotion that trumped dissenting counternarratives on issues ranging from the conduct of the War on Terror to the just distribution of resources.

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Obama (2007a) similarly claimed that for nearly 7 years, President Bush has ignored Franklin Roosevelts wise counsel about the corrosive effects of fear. Indeed, instead of urging us to reject fear, he has stoked false fear and undermined our values. American values were undermined by the Iraq War, waterboarding, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamao Bay and illegal wiretapping (Obama 2007a). Obama argues that such actions have contributed to foreigners no longer feeling positive emotions towards America:
When you travel to the worlds trouble spots as a United States Senator, much of what you see is from a helicopter . . . . And it makes you stop and wonder: when those faces look up at an American helicopter, do they feel hope, or do they feel hate? (Obama 2007b, p. 228)

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For Obama, son of a Kenyan who saw an American education as exemplifying hope, the fact that America may now engender negative emotions is deeply troubling (as well as a security issue). Above all, Obama is promising to restore Americans own feelings of pride in their country and national identity. Obamas diagnosis is that American society has been driven by the wrong, negative emotions and his job is to offer hope in a better (and more inclusive) America based on more positive feelings: We are choosing hope over fear. Were choosing unity over division and sending a powerful message that change is coming to America (Obama 2008c). It was a theme that he returned to in his Victory Speech:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible . . . who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer . . . . Its the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled. . . . Its the answer that led those whove been told for so long by so many to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we can achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more toward the hope of a better day. (Obama 2008a)

Obamas own persona of difference is meant to exemplify not only the narrative of hope, unity and inclusion but American exceptionalism and the American dream. Feelings of hope should replace feelings of fear: Hope, hope is what led me here today. With a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America (Obama 2008c, p. 11). In short, Obama is arguing for a more inclusive conception of American citizenship, and one that counters the forms of governance identied by Berlant, Isin and Bigo. As we have seen, Obama explicitly rejects the focus on emotions such as terror (Berlant 2005, p. 50) in his arguments against the politics of fear. His personal story is used to construct a narrative about hope and the American dream that counters attempts to encourage anxieties about the Other (Isin 2004, p. 217) or to foster feelings of unease that construct migration issues as security problems (Bigo 2002, p. 63). It is a very different emotional regime from Bushs, and also reects a more positive mobilisation of emotion around issues of migration to that in the British examples that have just been discussed. Obamas narrative of hope and inclusion is partly about race, as the implicit references to his father show, but it also has economic ramications. In Obamas view, the emotional pathology in the American body politic is not just reducible to Bushs mobilisation of fear. The problem is also anger in the heart of American society which Obama is offering to heal. Some of that anger is amongst black Americans. It is related to the legacies of slavery, continued disadvantage and discrimination: the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races (Obama 2008d). However, Obama (2008d) has also diagnosed a similar anger which exists within segments of the white community. These are whites who dont feel that they have been

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particularly privileged by their race; who believe they have worked hard for what they have achieved; who are worried about the effects of globalisation; low wages and the possibilities of losing their jobs overseas. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away. Such whites can feel resentment at those they believe are getting something at their expense, whether via welfare entitlements or afrmative action (see further Barbalet 1998, pp. 75 76). Obama argues that the resulting resentments and anger helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and afrmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition (Obama 2008d). In other words, it is an anger that fed into neo-liberal arguments that special interests were gaining benets to the disadvantage of mainstream Americans. The feeling of anxiety and that dreams are slipping away has been heightened by the turmoil of the global nancial crisis. Indeed Obama has been accused of also mobilising a politics of fear fear of economic meltdown as in his statement that We meet at a moment of great uncertainty for America. The economic crisis we face is the worst since the Great depression with Americans losing their jobs, and their homes, and their life savings (Obama 2008e). It was a theme that he returned to in his Victory Speech when he talked of the mothers and fathers who will lie awake after the children fall asleep and wonder how theyll make the mortgage or pay their doctors bills or save enough for their childrens college education (Obama 2008a). For Obama, a key to a better society has long lain in placing less emphasis on cutting government expenditure on welfare and more emphasis on a form of affective citizenship that involves feeling empathy for others:
Theres a lot of talk in this country about the federal decit. But I think we should talk more about our empathy decit the ability to put ourselves in someone elses shoes; to see the world through those who are different from us the child whos hungry, the laid-off steelworker, the immigrant woman cleaning your school dorm. (Obama 2006)

In short, Obamas politics of empathy (which resonates too with Rudds politics of compassion) is an attempt to develop a citizen identity that is more compassionate and socially connected than extreme neo-liberal forms of the abstract, self-reliant citizen. It is also a citizen identity that facilitates a larger role for government welfare and, therefore, has a different conception of citizen rights and entitlements. Obama is countering the emotional iz ek, has economy of neo-liberalism, which Jodi Dean (2008, pp. 54, 58), drawing on Z described as the fantasy of the free market promises that everyone will win. Whereas, in the words of a 2008 Obama campaign advertisement: Instead of prosperity trickling down, pain has trickled up. Obama mobilised an opposing economy of emotion, in which the state will lessen citizens feelings of pain; protecting and offering security in times of private sector economic downturn (Obama 2009a). In Obamas diagnosis, this approach will lessen white feelings of antagonism towards other groups that (in neo-liberal ideology at least) were perceived to be getting special benets at the expense of mainstream white Americans. Once again, the emotions Obama is trying to encourage are related to a different model of citizenship. This is not the self-reliant, entrepreneurial citizen of neo-liberal mythology, eschewing the role of government, expecting people to help themselves while rational economic man provides for his family and protects them from others ripping off taxpayers and threatening the American way of life. This is a model of citizenship that helps to justify a more active role for the state in supporting the less fortunate. It reects an alternative emotional regime and a different model of governmentality. One can see the differences in emotional regime and in governmentality particularly clearly if one compares Bushs attitudes to the unemployed with Obamas. Bush (2002)

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tended to construct the unemployed as being welfare dependant and implied that their personal failings had contributed to their not making sufcient effort to obtain a job. He felt compassion for those who helped themselves (see further Berlant 2004, pp. 2 4, 77 79, Johnson 2005, pp. 53 54). It was a form of neo-liberal governance designed to construct self-reliant, entrepreneurial citizens (Corner and Harvey 1991). Obama, by contrast, proudly lists the steps which government is taking, as part of its massive economic stimulus package, to increase the number of jobs available and also to help folks whove borne the brunt of this recession (Obama 2009b). The unemployed are depicted as victims of circumstance who people should feel empathy for. Obama describes visiting a job centre where peoples faces reected the sense of anxiety, the fear. He acknowledged the need to remind ourselves that behind these statistics are peoples lives, their capacity to do right by their families (Obama 2009b). He is encouraging a form of governmentality that is based on a less individualistic and self-reliant conception of citizen identity and that encourages feelings of solidarity with others less fortunate than oneself. It is also a form of governmentality that encourages a much larger role for the state. Obama argues that a just society will recognise and address the various forms of pain, anxiety and anger that citizens are feeling. He is attempting to forge a more inclusive form of affective citizenship by mobilising empathy. Many of the examples given in the rst part of this article also involved mainstream citizens being asked to empathise with the emotions of people who had previously been marginalised, whether indigenous families or same-sex couples. However, there is a problem that Obamas rhetoric cannot address (partly for strategic electoral reasons). Even if it is successfully mobilised, empathy itself cannot ensure desirable outcomes (not least because views of what constitutes desirable or good outcomes differ). Are we meant to feel empathy for indigenous victims of colonialism or for the claimed white victims of political correctness (Berlant 1997, p. 2, Johnson 2005)? Should empathetic policy involve Bushs (2002) compassionate conservatism, with its sympathy for those who exhibit neo-liberal self-reliance (see further Berlant 2004, pp. 2 3), or a more welfare liberal emphasis on government assistance for the needy (Johnson 2005)? As Nussbaum (2001, pp. 435, 439), who advocates more compassionate leaders and citizens, nonetheless notes: A compassionate society might still be an unjust society. It might weep about the fact that taxes cause people to miss out on luxury goods such as peacock tongues (Nussbaum 2001, p. 414). Indeed, Nussbaum herself has been criticised for risking reproducing both surrogate forms of western liberal superiority (Bhabha 1996, p. 193) and a neo-liberal insensitivity to the undeserving poor (Hoggett 2000, pp. 169, 179, 2006, p. 151, Nussbaum 2001, p. 439). Obamas own politics of empathy and hope inevitably prioritised some forms of social exclusion and marginalisation, and downplayed or dismissed others. It is not just conservative Republicans who might feel that their concerns, fears and anxieties are not being adequately characterised or addressed. The same day that saw a black president elected also saw Proposition Eight, which removed rights to same-sex marriage, win in California. The cover of Americas leading gay rights magazine proclaimed in open letters to the next president that Gay is the New Black and gay rights the Last Great Civil Rights Struggle.5 Obamas own emphasis on the legacies of black slavery downplays the role of settler colonialism in regard to the American Indian population and in annexing the Hawaiian Islands (that Obama grew up in).6 It also downplays the fact that there are many different stories of racial resistance and liberation that can be told. Gilroy (2005, p. 441) has noted the importance of dislodging America from its position as our inevitable destination in order to learn from histories, concepts and strategies in other

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parts of the world. Furthermore, it would have been harder for a female politician such as Hillary Clinton to mobilise emotion as effectively as Obama. As Messner (2007, p. 473) notes, being caring and compassionate can easily be depicted as weakness in a female politician (while strong women are depicted as ball-busting). By contrast, Obama can talk openly about the need for fathers to pass on empathy to their children, arguing against conceptions of masculinity that wrongly dismiss kindness as soft (Obama 2008b, p. 238). Conclusion The advocacy of empathetic forms of citizenship, therefore, offers no simple solutions. Yet, the arguments here demonstrate that one needs to pay attention to who is seen as the legitimate object of empathy as well as who is seen as the legitimate object of fear (see further Johnson 2005). Indeed, these arguments indicate the importance of adding an affective component to the aspects of inclusive citizenship previously identied by theorists such as Ruth Lister (2007). Consequently, George E. Marcus (2002, p. 8) arguably had a point when he claimed that: the solution to good citizenship is located in our capacity to feel. Nonetheless, emotions can obviously be mobilised in a way that many see as negative and dysfunctional. For politics is clearly, in Lauren Berlants (2005, p. 47) words, a scene of emotional contestation. It has been argued here that a concept of affective citizenship can help to explain how that emotional contestation has crucial implications for constructions of citizen identities, rights and entitlements. Acknowledgement
My thanks to the journals anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this paper. My thanks too for feedback received when an earlier version of this paper was presented at the Colloquium, Moving citizens: exploring worlds of emotional politics, Birkbeck College, 24 October 2008.

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Notes
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. See e.g. Clarke et al. (2006), Redlawsk (2006), Neuman et al. (2007) and Westen (2007). See e.g. Stone (1997), Shumway (2003, pp. 1 28); and Coontz (2005, pp. 5 12). Marcus (2002) makes a convincing case that emotion and reason are not opposed. For a critique of the traditional welfare states deciencies in meeting citizens broader emotional needs, see Hoggett (2000, p. 165). See the front cover of The Advocate, issue 1021, 16 December 2008. Available from: http:// www.advocate.com/TOC.aspx?id=98760 [Accessed 8 October 2010]. Bill Clinton apologised for the annexation of Hawaii in 1993.

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