Abstract

Feeling Power is a bold and provocative book whose breadth of inquiry is stunning. Author Megan Boler sets out to rescue emotions from their devalued and obscure political status by showing that they are both a site of social control and also a site for political resistance. She situates her inquiry within the context of education, convinced that classrooms, especially within higher education, constitute significant locations of social and political struggle. Boler takes the reader on a wide-ranging interdisciplinary exploration where she analyzes various discourses to show how emotions get visibly and invisibly addressed in education and how emotions reflect particular historical, cultural, and social arrangements. Her broad conception of emotion resonates with philosophical accounts that view emotions as (partially) cognitive as well as with accounts that give emotions a role in moral judgments and ethical reasoning. In Part I, Boler builds upon the work of feminist theorists, such as Elizabeth Spelman (1989, 1991), Alison Jaggar (1989), Sandra Bartky (1990), and Sue Campbell (1997), and uses key concepts drawn from poststructural theorists to develop a theoretical framework for revealing and explicating the myriad ways in which the "politics of emotion," shaped by different scholarly disciplines, functions in public education to enforce social control of the nation's citizens. Through astute, gender-sensitive historical critiques of the mental hygiene and character education movements, and a close analysis of Daniel Goleman's (1995) contemporary notion of emotional intelligence, Boler shows how we are taught to internalize and enact emotional rules, and roles, that serve to maintain society's particular stratifications of gender, race, and class. The chapters on emotional intelligence and the emotional literacy curricula founded on this concept are, I think, among the best in the book. Together they constitute a persuasive example of the power of Boler's method of discourse analysis.