An unlikely premise has emerged as a feminist commonplace over recent years, both in academic feminist philosophy and in online spaces where young women congregate. It is the belief that female rage is in and of itself a coherent political tool. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, queer-feminist scholar Sara Ahmed argues for the political effectiveness of »the performance of anger – as a claim of against-ness«.[1] And, in philosopher Amia Srinivasan’s 2018 »The Aptness of Anger«, she describes a form of »affective injustice« via which oppressed subjects’ expressions of righteous anger are dismissed by calls to calm down.[2] Meanwhile, on social media platforms such as TikTok, young feminists share and repost film-clip montages of women screaming with anger, tagged as #femalerage, a trend that has gained viral popularity.[3]

This claim for anger as political action is not surprising if we understand that the current cultural mode in which we operate is one that prioritizes on all levels the expression of feeling over other ways of evaluating and responding to phenomena. In my forthcoming book, Against Affect, I argue that the affective turn since the 1990s in the academic humanities and social sciences has been paralleled by a broader, cultural affective turn in which Feeling is King – and that this development has not been beneficial for anyone.

The rationale behind the emergence of the affective turn is that the binary pair of ideas »emotion« and »reason« are historically gendered and racialized in ways that demand destabilization. Since the Enlightenment project of the eighteenth century, women and people of colour have been associated with emotionality and white men with logic and reason, with the latter elevated above the former, regardless of the capabilities of individual subjects from all groups. The affective turn marked an attempt to challenge this historical bias, but it did this by prioritizing and valorizing the previously deprecated affective field that remained marked as »feminine« and »non-white« – rather than by redistributing reason to all subjects.

It is doubtless the case that rage expressed by women has long been misheard, disallowed, or twisted – justifiable anger is perceived as hysterical shrillness, for example, and as »unfeminine«. But the claim that unmediated anger itself can or should be an effective political strategy makes sense only within the kind of thinking proper to the affective turn, in which the expression of feeling takes on the status of both authentic, transcendental truth and performative marker of virtue, especially if a claim of vulnerability can be made for the one doing the feeling and telling.

Anger on the part of those subordinated, maligned and abjected is, of course, understandable and inevitable. But, as raw emotion, it is – and should be – an initial response, a reactive impulse in the face of injustice, not a strategy that can be expected to overcome it. It is fuel, it is impetus for action; it is not end-product. The affective turn marks, as much as anything, then, a short-circuiting of strategizing, a failure of working-through. As Anna Kornbluh has argued in her recent book Immediacy, the fashion, facilitated by the internet, for »hot takes«, for immediate and instantaneous reactions to unfolding events, accelerates and intensifies emotions (including anger, fear and panic) and erases the activity of mediation.[4] Mediation is the process by which any reactive emotion, including and especially anger, may be fruitfully transformed into strategy.

Many claim that we are now entering a worrying political age dominated by the authoritarian »strong man«, a figure of toxic, bullying masculinity. One need only think of the recent footage of Donald Trump and JD Vance, angrily pointing their fingers in the face of Volodymyr Zelenskyj in the Oval Office, to illustrate this point. Our opposition to the boorish angry style of such figures only has coherence if we agree that civil, reasoned discourse and careful, critical thinking are the better political tools for all subjects. To argue that unmediated male rage is toxic, while explosions of female rage are empowering or redemptive is understandable, but a strategic dead end. It fails on two counts: it both relies on a logic of victimhood that legitimizes the feelings of the oppressed, but only by reifying their status as vulnerable, and it continues to pursue the bankrupt argument that emotion rather than reason is the natural property of women.

Against Affect will be published in the University of Nebraska Press’s “Provocations” series in April 2026. Preorder here.

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[1] Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004).

[2] Amia Srinivasan, “The Aptness of Anger”, The Journal of Political Philosophy, 26:2, 2018, 123–144.

[3] See, for example: https://www.tiktok.com/@urfavezzz/video/7213812459268787462?lang=en

[4] Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, Or the Style of Too Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2024).

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Lisa Downing was a participant of the ifk Conference »All the Rage. The Challenges of Female Anger« from 2–4 April 2025.