Mass-mediated discourse on emotion,and the feeling rules it conveys: The case of the Sarrazin debate

Abstract

This article argues that mass-mediated public discourse produces a discourse on emotion and disseminates specific feeling rules for different groups of people by studying one of the most heated debates on immigrant integration in Germany during the past decade – that surrounding Thilo Sarrazin’s book Germany Does Itself In. Adapting and further developing Arlie Hochschild’s notion of feeling rules as a ‘sensitising concept’ within a grounded theory approach, it analyses 427 statements about ordinary Germans’ emotions, which were drawn from a corpus of 961 newspaper articles, letters to the editor and other items. The article shows that the debate’s discourse on emotion assigned different sets of emotions to two different groups of ordinary Germans: ‘Autochthonous Germans’ were predominantly described as having Angst (German for anxiety), while ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ were partly described as being offended or hurt. It also conveyed different sets of feeling rules for each of them. While ‘autochthonous Germans’ were generally not asked to control their Angst, there was a tendency to ask ‘immigrants from Muslim-majority countries’ to hold back their feelings. The article interprets this pattern as an unequal distribution of recognition and discusses how future research may benefit from the approach presented here.