What do emotions actually do? Recent work in the history of emotions and its intersections with cultural studies and new materialism has produced groundbreaking revelations around this fundamental question. In Emotional Bodies, contributors pick up these threads of inquiry to propose a much-needed theoretical framework for further study of materiality of emotions, with an emphasis on emotions' performative nature. Drawing on diverse sources and wide-ranging theoretical approaches, they illuminate how various persons and groups—patients, criminals, medieval religious communities, revolutionary crowds, and humanitarian agencies—perform emotional practices. A section devoted to medical history examines individual bodies while a section on social and political histories studies the emergence of collective bodies.

Contributors: Jon Arrizabalaga, Rob Boddice, Leticia Fernández-Fontecha, Emma Hutchison, Dolores Martín-Moruno, Piroska Nagy, Beatriz Pichel, María Rosón, Pilar León-Sanz, Bertrand Taithe, and Gian Marco Vidor.

| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Introduction PART I: DISEASED BODIES UNDER CONSTRUCTION 1. Hysteria or Tetanus?: Ambivalent Embodiments and the Authenticity of Pain 2. The Criminal of Passion: Its Construction in Italian Legal and Medical Discourses, 1860s–1920s 3. Locating Cancer: Body Image and Emotions from a Psychosomatic Perspective (1950–1959) PART II: PERFORMING EMOTIONAL BODIES 4. The Language of Children's Pain (1870–1900) 5. Photographing the Emotional Body: Performing Expressions in the Theater and the Psychological S 6. Yolanda: Youth, Heroin, and AIDS through the Lens of Photographic Practices PART III: MAKING SOCIAL BODIES 7. Making a Collective Emotional Body: Francis of Assisi Celebrating Christmas in Greccio (1223) 8. Fearful Female Bodies: The Pétroleuses of the Paris Commune PART IV: HUMANITARIAN BODIES IN ACTION 9. Performing Compassion in Wartime: Humanitarian Narratives in the Spanish Civil Wars of the 1870s 10. Humanitarian Emotions through History: Imaging Suffering and Performing Aid 11. Compassion Fatigue: The Changing Nature of Humanitarian Emotions Afterword Selected Bibliography Contributors Index Back cover |"Recommended." —Choice
"This well-constructed and consistently high-quality collection makes a compelling case for the usefulness of performativity as a mode of biocultural and emotional analysis." —Journal of Interdisciplinary History
"This wide-ranging and rigorously historicized collection of essays gives new insights into how emotions have changed and been deployed over time. The stress on emotions as a practical engagement with the world that has tangible effects is especially welcome."—Jo Labanyi, editor of Constructing Identity in Contemporary Spain: Theoretical Debates and Cultural Practice
|Dolores Martín-Moruno holds a Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship at the Institute for Ethics, History, and the Humanities at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Geneva. Her books include On Resentment: Past and Present. Beatriz Pichel is VC2020 Lecturer in Photographic History at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University.