Laurencia Sáenz Benavides
Oppression has typical emotional effects that are disempowering for those who experience them. Shame, fear, self-hatred, self-disgust, among others, are salient emotions that have a prominent place in first-person, phenomenological and narrative accounts of lived experiences of social oppression (Du Bois 2018 ; Fanon 1952 ; Pyke 2010 ; Whitney 2018 ). Such painful emotions can be said to be integral to the experience of oppression, and so reveal them to be non-accidentally connected to pervasive emotional structures of oppression (Sáenz Benavides 2021 ). However, given the way structures of oppression tend to produce fragmentation in its subjects, these emotions are often experienced in ambiguous and ambivalent ways. In this sense, emotional ambiguity and ambivalence can then also be identified as an overarching emotional experience non-accidentally connected to the experience of oppression, whose depleting effects contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of oppressive structures. If emotional ambivalence has such debilitating effects, one of the logical conclusions is that solving emotional ambivalence, by reducing or eliminating it would be the first step towards building more empowering emotional dispositions that facilitate opposition to oppressive powers. W. E. B. Du Bois ( 2018 ), Gloria Anzaldúa ( 1987 ) and Maria Lugones ( 2003 ), whose descriptions and analysis of lived experiences of oppression (racism and misogyny) I will draw on, take the desire to eliminate ambivalence as a common temptation for the oppressed. However, for these authors, attempting to eradicate ambivalence appears as a misguided goal. In this paper, I will build on their insights to show how emotional ambivalence can be revealed not as something that necessarily hinders resistance, but as an integral way of resisting itself. In this sense, emotional ambivalence is dialectic. It is therefore important to make room for ambivalence when we think about emotional resistance to oppression.