A timely intervention into contemporary debates on emotions, gender, race and power, this collection of essays interrogates how emotional expectations are established as gendered, racialised and class-based notions. It then explores the ways these expectations have historically been generated, stratified and maintained by institutions, societies, media and those with access to power. Global in outlook, it examines twentieth-century transnational feminists, settler colonies in southern Africa and post-unification Italy, Maoist China, the Soviet Union and the medicalised spaces of the British Raj.