The Commission for the History of Women at the Committee of Historical Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences

Venue: Warsaw
Time: 23.-24.2022
Proposals by: 30.06.2021

The main premise of the history of emotions – understood in cultural terms – is the claim that psychological and mental ability to feel emotion is universal, but the ways in which emotions are evoked, felt and expressed depend both on individual propensities as well as cultural norms prevailing in a particular historical period and within a given group (Barbara Rosenwein, 2002). Furthermore, in recent years research on emotions in the context of gender history increasingly undermines the stereotypical belief that emotion in the past was a straightforward socio-cultural indicator of the masculine and feminine. As emphasized by Damien Boquet and Didier Lett, the antithesis – characteristic of Western culture – of emotion vs. rational thinking, where emotionality is usually associated with femininity, and rational thinking – consistently with masculinity, definitively requires more in-depth and detailed historical study (Emotions and the concept of gender, 2018).

The proposed conference is an attempt to answer the challenge thus formulated, in the context of the question of historically diverse processes shaping desirable emotional behavior in specific social, religious or political groups. This is why the main points of reference will be the concepts of emotional communities and emotional regimes. The organizers define an emotional community – after Barbara Rosenwein – as a group where similar norms of emotional expression are in force, and specific emotions are similarly evaluated. Depending on the period, it might be a school, manor, household, religious community, a community united by economic interest, a group of friends or a family.

The organizers understand the concept of emotional regimes – after William Reddy – as a set of normative emotions, as well as practices, rituals and standards of emotional behavior in force in a given community, whose rejection leads to the exclusion of an individual. The organizers are primarily interested in research focused on specific communities and the promotion of a given emotionality in a group, with particular emphasis on the role that gender plays in „teaching emotion“. Read more and source … (Web)