All Emotions Aren’t the Same: Intersectionality and Women's Political Action

• In Event: Intersectional Approaches to Elections and Institutions

Abstract

If there was ever a time in American history to understand women’s politics, that time is certainly now. As with the increase of women candidates, the rise of women’s political engagement, and social movements centered on women’s issues, scholars have little intersectional insight into what motivates women’s political participation (Lopez Bunyasi and Smith 2018). In 2022, women were mobilized by their emotions in response to legal decisions that rolled back the right to reproductive choice across the United States. Emotions -- pride, anger, fear, and hope -- are powerful forces in American politics (Phoenix 2020), yet how positive and negative emotions matter for women, accounting for their race, is less understood. In our paper, we explore the roles of pride, fear, and anger as a mobilizer for women. We ask, what role do emotions play in motivating non-electoral participation by women of color? We expect that an intersectional approach to emotions in politics unearths differential impact. Using the 2020 Collaborative Mutiracial Post-Election Survey, we find that emotions motivate women to engage in more political acts, and specific political acts, and this varies across emotion and race. Overall, we find that while no one emotion has the same effect on women’s non-electoral political participation, women are similar in their emotional responses to politics.

Authors

• Christine Marie Slaughter, Boston University

• Camille Danielle Burge, Villanova University