Quelling Emotion: Emotion Work to Resist the Anti-TQLGB+ Emotion Culture of Fear in Florida

This article presents ethnographic research about resistance to the anti-TQLGB+ politics in Florida conducted for a year (2023–2024) at 23 public events. My analysis identifies one core way people and groups resisted this current iteration of anti-TQLGB+ politics was via a process of quelling emotion. I detail how quelling emotion was emotion work, resisting the broader culture of fear, enacted by naming fear, facing fear, and being calm and rational. This article contributes to understandings of emotion and social movements by offering a way to conceptualize emotion work as contending with an emotion in which actors are embedded, demonstrating emotion work in response to an outer-ring emotion culture, and conceptualizing a notion of emotional refusal to prevent the viability of an emotion to (re)cement relations of domination and subordination.