Outlawed emotions: a contemporary history of teachers’ feelings

This article examines the historical production of emotional norms in teaching and the ways particular emotions become constructed as professionally legitimate or illegitimate within contemporary schooling. Drawing on Foucauldian approaches to discourse, power, and subjectivity, it traces how philosophical, psychological, and organisational traditions in the Global North have shaped dominant understandings of emotional conduct centred on rational control and self-management. Through a genealogy of emotion, the article shows how binaries such as reason/emotion, private/public and professionalism/vulnerability continue to organise expectations of teacher behaviour. Drawing on qualitative interview data from Australian pre-service teachers, the analysis illustrates how these emotional rules are internalised and enacted within schools through expectations of restraint, composure, and professionalism. It argues that emotional regulation functions not simply as a personal skill but as a technology of professional self-formation through which teachers become recognisable as competent subjects.