This chapter is concerned with identifying an ethical
emotional grammar in the forging of feminist solidarities. While acknowledging
the potential for the modern emotion of empathy to work in patronising and
appropriative ways, the aim is to recuperate empathy's more progressive,
ethical and transformative moments. This discussion is located in the
contemporary context of global capitalism which is identified in some accounts
with postemotionalism, social numbness, disconnection and the failure of
empathy. Noting that the workings of empathy have always been haunted by its
potential failure, it is argued that such precariousness can keep
responsibility, difference and critical reflexivity at the heart of feminist
empathic identification. In this view, empathy can bring emotion, ethics and
politics together to facilitate contextually sensitive, contingent and,
hopefully, politically effective feminist solidarities. Thus understood,
empathy creates the effects of certain boundaries but also enables solidaristic
connections across those boundaries. It is in the encounter itself; the
connection, or contact zone, that progressive empathic solidarities are forged.