What is emotional injustice, really? distinguishing emotional injustice from emotional harms and oppression

Recent work on emotional injustice has highlighted the ways in which emotions are regulated, devalued or imposed, especially for members of marginalized groups. However, the relations among emotional injustice, emotional harm and emotional oppression remain undertheorized. We offer a conceptual framework that disentangles these notions and clarifies what makes emotional injustice unjust rather than merely harmful or oppressive.We argue that emotional injustice occurs when individuals' emotions are treated or used in ways that impose arbitrary relational disadvantage-disadvantages that arise from treatment, regard or social structures and position people differently relative to one another for normatively extraneous reasons. By contrast, emotional harms involve suffering without relational disadvantage, while emotional oppression is systemic and group-directed and targets members of marginalized groups.Building on relational theories of equality, we argue that emotional injustice is inherently relational and operates across a continuum of social positions. Privileged individuals may be constrained by emotion norms, such as prohibitions against vulnerability or dependence, that paradoxically reinforce their social position. Marginalized individuals, by contrast, may face emotional injustices that directly reinforce subordination, as when emotion norms delegitimize their anger or constrain their emotional expression.