Affective injustice refers to an injustice related to a person as an affective being. It is thus a quite general category of injustice: it involves any kind of injustice in which emotions and affects play a central role. Because it encompasses a broad category of injustice, there are several subcategories of affective injustice corresponding to different types of injustice. For instance, Whitney (Citation2018) argues that some people’s emotions receive less uptake than others. For instance, when women are expressing anger in a particular context, they often get told they are “too emotional” or even “hysterical,” whereas men expressing similar emotions in similar contexts get less dismissive remarks and are more often heard. This is an injustice: some people’s emotions get more uptake, meaning that some emotions are considered more valid pieces of information than others; they are considered more rational than other emotions and receive more understanding. Applied to autism, neurotypical emotions consistently receive more uptake than autistic ones. For instance, I will discuss later in the paper how a neurotypical person’s annoyance at an autistic person’s refusal to partake in small talk receives more uptake than the autistic person’s annoyance at a neurotypical person’s small talk.
…affective injustice provides a good framework for understanding autistic injustice. Emotional norms that rule in our society are catered toward neurotypical emotional norms. Autistic emotional needs and preferences are neglected. This emotional imperialism represents an injustice against autistic individuals.
Emotional imperialism refers to the injustices being done when one group imposes their emotional regime on the other group. An emotional regime consists of all the norms regarding emotions that are agreed upon within a group. Examples include norms regarding the appropriate emotions to feel in a situation and which emotions are considered inappropriate to feel or express in a specific context. It also includes norms about which behavior, people, or objects deserve praise. Moreover, it involves prioritizing the affective responses of the dominant group. When one group of people’s emotional norms are imposed on another group of people, this is emotional imperialism, which creates affective injustice.
A clear definition of emotional imperialism can be found in this quote: “Emotional imperialism involves a powerful group imposing aspects of its culture’s emotional norms and standards on another less powerful group whilst at the same time marking out the other culture’s emotional norms and standards as deviant and inferior” (Archer & Matheson, Citation2022, p. 771). This definition is inspired by Iris Marion Young’s concept of cultural imperialism (Young, Citation1990). Emotional imperialism is, in fact, a form of cultural imperialism, focusing on the affective aspects of cultural imperialism. Young (Citation1990) defines cultural imperialism as a powerful group imposing its culture on a less powerful group. A culture consists, amongst other things, norms, including emotional norms. The dominant culture presents its norms as normal or unquestioned: simply the way things are. The suppressed group’s norms are considered to be inferior and abnormal. Stereotypes are formed of the suppressed group, and they are supposed to be an aberration of the dominant group’s norms, which are presented as universal.
