Emotions as Commodities

Capitalism has made rationality into a pervasive feature of human action and yet, far from heralding a loss of emotionality, capitalist culture has been accompanied with an unprecedented intensification of emotional life. This raises the question: how could we have become increasingly rationalized and more intensely emotional?

Emotions as Commodities offers a simple hypothesis: that consumer acts and emotional life have become closely and inseparably intertwined with each other, each one defining and enabling the other. Commodities facilitate the experience of emotions, and so emotions are converted into commodities. The contributors of this volume present the co-production of emotions and commodities as a new type of commodity that has gone unseen and unanalyzed by theories of consumption - emodity. Indeed, this innovative book explores how emodity includes atmospherical or mood-producing commodities, relation-marking commodities and mental commodities, all of which the purpose it is to change and improve the self.

Analysing a variety of modern day situations such as emotional management through music, creation of urban sexual atmospheres and emotional transformation through psychotherapy, Emotions as Commodities will appeal to scholars, postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Sociology, Cultural Studies, Marketing, Anthropology and Consumer Studies.

Introduction: Emodities or the Making of Emotional Commodities

Eva Illouz

"It is All Included - Without the Stress": Exploring the Production of Relaxation in Club Med Seaside Resorts

Yaara Benger Alaluf

Emotional Ear Drops: the Music Industry and Technologies of Emotional Management

Ori Schwarz

Cinema as an Emotional Commodity- the Horror Genre and the Commodification of Fear

Daniel Gilon

Sex cards in Tel Aviv: Mood work, Recreational Sexuality and Urban atmospheres

Eva Illouz