During the 1980s, the AIDS crisis unleashed a torrent of animosity against gays and lesbians. As hatred rose, so too did physical assaults. Most of the perpetrators were teenagers, who did not just torment queer adults – they also directed their anger and hatred at their peers. As a result, a substantial percentage of gay and lesbian youth dropped out of school, abused alcohol and drugs, and attempted suicide. Two types of violence consequently plagued queer life: violence from attackers and self-harm. Some advocates responded by focusing on preventing attacks on the streets. They worked with police to improve their responses and lobbied legislators to enact hate crimes protections, which helped make antiqueer violence visible. Others, typically teachers and parents of queer children, focused on creating support systems in schools, so that gay and lesbian teens would not give up hope for a better future.

Hate preachers are not only rife among religious fundamentalists. They are also found in the extremes at both ends of the political spectrum. In social media, waves of outrage and hate speech targeting politicians and journalists are the order of the day. Women are most severely affected. Friedrich Ebert, the first Social Democratic President of the Weimar Republic, was already receiving hate mail in the 1920s. The author Bertolt Brecht once wrote that hate distorted a person’s features. He was referring to hate towards the National Socialists, who forced him and many others to emigrate. In Brecht’s view, this hate was understandable, but it made its victims resemble their hate-filled persecutors all too closely. This chapter shows that hatred as a political instrument has always reared its ugly head when people make radical distinctions between friend and foe and attempt to destroy their enemies by force. Democratic societies, in contrast, have made hatred a punishable offence. After 1945, the lesson has finally been learnt, with exceptions: in democracies, people argue, persistently and vehemently, polemically and pointedly. But they do not hate.

This chapter argues for the importance of intersectionality as a heuristic framework through which to understand how identities and emotions are produced in discourse. The chapter begins with a historical overview of theoretical discussions around intersectionality. Particular focus is put on the ways in which intersectionality has been recently rediscovered in different strands of research on language in society. The chapter then moves on to showcase discourse analytical work that has operationalized intersectionality with the help of a variety of techniques such as conversation analysis, online ethnography and multimodal critical discourse analysis in order to understand the social and political life of three emotions: hate, desire and shame. The chapter closes with a few reflections about future avenues for further investigation such as the domain of hope and its potential for social justice and sociopolitical change.