Emotion, Rationality and Reality

After meeting with my CSL supervisor and thinking about this week’s readings I am left with two main questions, both of which resonate with Campbell’s(2002) “From Thinking to Feeling” article. My first question involves evaluating the necessity, usefulness and reliability of emotion. Campbell clearly differentiates between thinking and feeling, and although these two do not necessarily function independently from each other, they are constructed as separate and distinct categories. Creating this division, this binary between intellectual, rational thought and emotion implies that emotion is inherently irrational. For example, in the article Campbell recalls a particular interview that aroused strong reactions from the researchers where a woman pretended to have a good time in order to escape her rapist. She reflects that “after we spent so much time in victim-blaming, people were trying so hard not to blame her or judge her escape strategy” (p. 47). Again, when addressing the deconstruction of  the need for the belief that rape happens to others in order to feel protected and less susceptible Campbell asserts that “we did know better, and we still felt otherwise” (p.47). These instances in particular, and I would argue the article as a whole, portray emotion us unpredictable, uneducated and distrustful. In this view, emotion does not equate to rational analysis. This leaves me wondering whether or not emotion is important intellectually, whether or not emotion can inform us academically and if so, in what ways.

                Something else that stuck out to me this week arose in my meeting with my CSL supervisor at the Kindred House. The Kindred House is a harm-reduction shelter for women and trans-women involved in the sex trade, most of whom struggle with problems such as homelessness and addiction. As an aside but related to my previous point, emotion was a big theme in our conversation. My supervisor addressed my emotional well being as well as the measures Kindred House takes to address the emotional well being of the women in the house. This contributed to my interest in what role emotion plays in the way we think about things. However, my attention was peaked when my supervisor mentioned that this experience is not like readings, inferring a distinction between academia and reality. My first reaction is to wonder why there is an automatic perceived gap between the two and if the gap is in fact perceived or if it is real. This again takes me back to the “From Thinking to Feeling” article in which a main theme is researchers being intellectually informed, having read all of the academic thought behind a subject and then being taken aback when confronted with real experiences of the subject. This makes me question what this gap between academia and reality is and how this gap can be bridged.