Killing Joy - Feminism and The History of Happiness - Sarah Ahmed
Killing Joy - Feminism and The History of Happiness - Sarah Ahmed
Killing Joy - Feminism and The History of Happiness - Sarah Ahmed
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to Signs
This article is drawn from my book The Promise of Happiness, which is forthcoming from
Duke University Press. Thanks to Duke for permission to include this article in Signs. In
particular, this article is taken from the second chapter of this book, “Feminist Killjoys,” which
draws on a much wider archive of feminist materials than I can represent here. The examples
I have chosen certainly reflect my own reading trajectories as a feminist: other readers, I hope,
will be able to supplement my choices with their own materials. With thanks to Miranda
Outman-Kramer and Karen Alexander for their generous help with editing this article.
[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2010, vol. 35, no. 3]
䉷 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2010/3503-0005$10.00
is a fantasy figure that erases the signs of labor under the sign of happiness.
The claim that women are happy and that this happiness is behind the work
they do functions to justify gendered forms of labor not as products of
nature, law, or duty, but as expressions of a collective wish and desire.
Feminist histories thus offer a different angle on the history of hap-
piness. Or perhaps feminist history teaches us that we need to give a history
to unhappiness. The history of the word unhappy might teach us about
the unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy
meant “causing misfortunate or trouble.”1 Only later did it come to mean
“miserable in lot or circumstances” or “wretched in mind.” We can learn
from the swiftness of translation between causing unhappiness and being
described as unhappy. We must learn.
The word wretched also has a suggestive genealogy, coming from wretch,
referring to a stranger, exile, or banished person. The wretch is not only
the one driven out of his or her native country but is also defined as one
who is “sunk in deep distress, sorrow, misfortune, or poverty,” “a miserable,
unhappy, or unfortunate person,” “a poor or hapless being,” and even “a
vile, sorry, or despicable person.” Can we rewrite the history of happiness
from the point of view of the wretch? If we listen to those who are cast as
wretched, then perhaps their wretchedness would no longer belong to them.
The sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness,
not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger but
because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.
I thus offer a different reading of happiness, not simply by offering
different readings of its intellectual history but by considering those who
are banished from it or who enter this history only as troublemakers,
wretches, strangers, dissenters, killers of joy. I call the archives that I draw
on “unhappy archives.” It is not simply a question of finding unhappiness
in such archives. Rather, these archives take shape through the circulation
of cultural objects that articulate unhappiness with the history of happiness.
An unhappy archive is one assembled around the struggle against happiness.
We can follow different weaves of unhappiness as a kind of unraveling of
happiness and the threads of its appeal.
Happy objects
I do not begin by assuming there is something called happiness that stands
apart or has autonomy, as if it corresponds to an object in the world. I
1
These definitions and all subsequent definitions are taken from the Oxford English
Dictionary, 2nd online edition.
2
I am focusing on objects for two related reasons. First, I want to consider how happiness
as a feeling is attributed to objects. In making such an argument, I do not want to reduce
happiness to feeling. As McMahon’s (2005) own history of happiness makes clear, the association
between happiness and feeling is a modern one, in circulation from the eighteenth century
onward. It is now hard to think about happiness without thinking about feeling. My task is
thus to consider the relation between feeling good and other kinds of social goods, or to
consider how feelings participate in making some things good or into goods. Second, in focusing
on objects of feeling, my aim is also to offer a model of feeling that is not subject-centered,
that does not assume that feelings begin with subjects and then move out to others (see also
Ahmed 2004). For other feminist non-subject-centered models of feeling, see Sedgwick (2003)
and Brennan (2004).
3
I am aware that Aristotle is not defining happiness or eudaimonia (which is sometimes
and more accurately translated as “flourishing”) in terms of feeling but rather in terms of doing
or living well. I draw on this model here because I am interested in what it means for happiness
to be considered as a telos, or end, and how this might make other things (including other
values) into means. Having said this, feeling does play a role in Aristotle’s ethics via his model
of habituation: the good man is one who learns to be affected in the right way by the right
things; “a man is not a good man at all who feels no pleasure in noble actions; just as no one
would call that man just who does not feel pleasure in acting justly” ([340 BC] 1998, 11–12).
Julia Annas describes how the virtuous agent “will act rightly and will have the right amount
of appropriate feeling where this will be a moderate amount” (1993, 61).
women and men should be educated in different ways that enable them
to fulfill their specific duties as gendered beings.
In this book, education for Sophy is about what she must become in
order to be a good wife for Emile. Happiness provides a script for her
becoming. Rousseau argues:
She loves virtue because there is nothing fairer in itself. She loves it
because it is a woman’s glory and because a virtuous woman is little
lower than the angels; she loves virtue as the only road to real
happiness, because she sees nothing but poverty, neglect, unhap-
piness, shame and disgrace in the life of the bad woman; she loves
virtue because it is dear to her revered father, and to her tender and
worthy mother; they are not content to be happy in their own virtue,
they desire hers; and she finds her chief happiness in the hope of
just making them happy! ([1762] 1993, 359)
4
In chap. 4 of The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed, forthcoming), “Melancholic Migrants,”
I describe citizenship as a technology for deciding whose happiness comes first. This deter-
mination of citizenship through happiness draws on a longer history in which the imperial
mission itself is justified through the utilitarian injunction of maximizing happiness. The migrant
who refuses the conditions of happiness thus becomes a threat to the nation-state.
we share feelings because we share the same object of feeling (so we might
feel sorrow at the loss of someone whom we both loved; our sorrow
would be directed toward an object that is shared). Fellow-feeling would
be when I feel sorrow about your sorrow although I do not share your
object of sorrow: “All fellow-feeling involves intentional reference of the
feeling to the other person’s experience” (Scheler [1913] 2008, 12). I
would speculate that in everyday life these different forms of shared feeling
can be confused because the object of feeling is sometimes but not always
exterior to the feeling that is shared.
Say I am happy about your happiness, and your happiness is with x. If
I share x, then your happiness and my happiness are not only shared but
can accumulate through being returned. Or I can simply disregard x: if
my happiness is directed just toward your happiness, and you are happy
about x, the exteriority of x can disappear or cease to matter (although
it can reappear). In cases where I am also affected by x and I do not share
your happiness with x, I might become uneasy and ambivalent, since I
am made happy by your happiness but I am not made happy by what
makes you happy. The exteriority of x would then announce itself as a
point of crisis: I want your happiness to be what makes me happy, but I
am reminded that even if my happiness is conditional on yours, your
happiness is conditional on x and I am not happy with x. In order to
preserve the happiness of all, we might even conceal from ourselves our
unhappiness with x or try to persuade ourselves that x matters less than
the happiness of the other who is made happy by x.
We have a hint of the rather uneasy dynamics of conditional happiness
in Émile. For Sophy, wanting to make her parents happy commits her in
a certain direction. If she can only be happy if they are happy, then she
must do what makes them happy. In one episode the father speaks to the
daughter about becoming a woman. He says: “You are a big girl now,
Sophy, you will soon be a woman. We want you to be happy, for our
sakes as well as yours, for our happiness depends on yours. A good girl
finds her own happiness in the happiness of a good man” (434). For the
daughter not to go along with the parent’s desire for marriage would not
only cause her parents unhappiness, it would also threaten the very re-
production of social form. The daughter has a duty to reproduce the form
of the family, which means taking up the cause of parental happiness as
her own.
It should be no surprise that Rousseau’s treatment of Sophy was a crucial
object of feminist critique. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her Vindication of the
Rights of Women, spoke out against Rousseau’s vision of what makes women
happy. She comments wryly about his treatment of Sophy: “I have probably
piest day of your life” before it actually happens. We might even happen
upon that which is anticipated as causing happiness. Indeed, the “might”
can hide a “must”: in order to preserve the happiness of all, you must
happen upon the right things in the right way. This is how the promissory
logics of happiness do more than make promises: to follow the paths of
happiness is to inherit the elimination of the hap.
What happens when what “must happen” does happen? Do happy
objects live up to their promise? As Arlie Russell Hochschild explores in
The Managed Heart, if the bride is not happy on the wedding day and
even feels “depressed and upset,” then she is experiencing an “inappro-
priate affect” (2003, 59) or is being affected inappropriately. You have to
save the day by feeling right: “Sensing a gap between the ideal feeling
and the actual feeling she tolerated, the bride prompts herself to be happy”
(61). The capacity to save the day depends on the bride being able to
make herself be affected in the right way or at least being able to persuade
others that she is being affected in the right way. To correct our feelings
is to become disaffected from a former affectation: the bride makes herself
happy by stopping herself from being miserable. Of course we learn from
this example that it is possible not to inhabit fully one’s own happiness,
or even to be alienated from one’s happiness, if the former affection
remains lively, or if one is made uneasy by the labor of making oneself
feel a certain way. Uneasiness might persist in the very feeling of being
happy, as a feeling of unease with the happiness one is in.
We cannot always close the gap between how we feel and how we think
we should feel. To feel the gap might be to feel a sense of disappointment.
Such disappointment can also involve an anxious narrative of self-doubt
(Why am I not made happy by this? What is wrong with me?) or a narrative
of rage, where the object that is “supposed” to make us happy is attributed
as the cause of disappointment. Your rage might be directed against the
object that fails to deliver its promise or it may spill out toward those who
promised you happiness through the elevation of some things as good.
We become strangers, or affect aliens, in such moments.
The feminist is an affect alien, estranged by happiness. We can under-
stand the negativity of the figure of the feminist killjoy much better if we
read her through the lens of the history of happiness, which is at once
the history of associations. Feminists, by declaring themselves feminists,
are already read as destroying something that is thought of by others not
only as being good but as the cause of happiness. The feminist killjoy
spoils the happiness of others; she is a spoilsport because she refuses to
convene, to assemble, or to meet up over happiness. In the thick sociality
of everyday spaces, feminists are thus attributed as the origin of bad feeling,
as the ones who ruin the atmosphere, which is how the atmosphere might
be imagined (retrospectively) as shared. A feminist colleague says to me
she just has to open her mouth in meetings to witness eyes rolling as if
to say, “Oh here she goes!”
My experience of being the feminist daughter in a conventional family
taught me much about rolling eyes. I recall feeling at odds with the per-
formance of good feeling. Say we are seated at the dinner table. Around
this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain
things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problem-
atic. You respond, carefully perhaps. You might be speaking quietly, or you
might be getting “wound up,” recognizing with frustration that you are
being wound up by someone who is winding you up. The violence of what
was said, the violence of provocation, goes unnoticed.
Let us take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist
kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she
expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public
signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses
anger about things? Or does the entry of anger simply mean that the bad
feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a
certain way? The feminist subject in the room hence brings others down,
not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing
how happiness is sustained, by erasing the signs of not getting along.
Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that
happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a
feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the
objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that the failure to be
happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others. Feminists might be
strangers at the table of happiness.
We can consider the relationship between the negativity of the figure
of the feminist killjoy and how certain bodies are encountered as being
negative. Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement
that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find
yourself: “It is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile
and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence
in our situation” (1983, 2). To be oppressed requires that you show signs
of happiness, signs of being or having been adjusted. As a result, for Frye,
“anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as
mean, bitter, angry or dangerous” (2). To be recognized as a feminist is
to be assigned to a difficult category and a category of difficulty. You are
already read as not easy to get along with when you name yourself a
feminist. You have to show that you are not difficult through displaying
signs of good will and happiness. Frye alludes to such experiences when
she describes how “this means, at the very least, that we may be found
to be ‘difficult’ or unpleasant to work with, which is enough to cost one’s
livelihood” (2–3). We can also witness an investment in feminist unhap-
piness (the myth that feminists kill joy because they are joyless). There is
a desire to believe that women become feminists because they are unhappy,
perhaps as a displacement of their envy for those who have achieved the
happiness they have failed to achieve.5 This desire functions as a defense
of happiness against feminist critique. This is not to say that feminists are
not unhappy (they might be or they might not be). My point here would
be that feminists are read as being unhappy, such that situations of conflict,
violence, and power are read as about the unhappiness of feminists rather
than about what feminists are unhappy about.
Of course, within feminism, some bodies more than others can be
attributed as the cause of unhappiness. We can place the figure of the
feminist killjoy alongside the figure of the angry black woman, explored
so well by writers such as Audre Lorde (1984b) and bell hooks (2000).
The angry black woman can be described as a killjoy; she may even kill
feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist
politics. She might not even have to make any such point to kill joy. You
can be affectively alien because you are affected in the wrong way by the
right things. Listen to the following description from bell hooks: “A group
of white feminist activists who do not know one another may be present
at a meeting to discuss feminist theory. They may feel bonded on the basis
of shared womanhood, but the atmosphere will noticeably change when
a woman of color enters the room. The white women will become tense,
no longer relaxed, no longer celebratory” (2000, 56).
It is not just that feelings are in tension but that the tension is located
somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is attributed as caused by
another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from the group, as
getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity. The black body
is attributed as the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a
shared atmosphere. Atmospheres might become shared if there is an agree-
ment as to where we locate the points of tension. As a feminist of color,
5
Feminists are regularly diagnosed within popular culture as sublimating their disappoint-
ment through politics. This is why there is a kinship between the feminist and other figures,
such as the spinster or the lesbian, who likewise embody the risk of disappointment (which is
presumed to be the proper affective consequence of the failure to achieve heterosexual hap-
piness). It is absolutely necessary that we continue to discuss the sexism and homophobia of
such figurations.
you do not even have to say anything to cause tension. The mere proximity
of some bodies involves an affective conversion. We learn from this ex-
ample how histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an atmo-
sphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies that seem to get in the way.
You can be affectively alien because you affect others in the wrong way:
your proximity gets in the way of other people’s enjoyment of the right
things, functioning as unwanted reminder of histories that are disturbing,
that disturb an atmosphere.
To speak out of anger as woman of color is to confirm your position
as the cause of tension. Lorde points out: “When women of Color speak
out of the anger that laces so many of our contacts with white women,
we are often told that we are ‘creating a mood of helplessness,’ ‘preventing
white women from getting past guilt,’ or ‘standing in the way of trusting
communication and action’” (1984b, 131). The woman of color must
let go of her anger in order for the white woman to move on. Some
bodies become blockage points, points where smooth communication
stops; they disturb the promise of happiness, which I would redescribe as
the social pressure to maintain signs of getting along. When the exposure
of violence becomes the origin of violence, then the violence that is ex-
posed is not revealed.
get our happy ending, premised on Sophy being given to Emile. The nar-
rator says, in response to the threat of such an unhappy ending: “Let us
give Emile his Sophy; let us restore this sweet girl to life and provide her
with a less vivid imagination and a happier fate” (441). Being restored to
life is here being returned to the straight and narrow. Imagination is what
makes women look beyond the script of happiness to a different fate. Having
made Sophy sweet and unimaginative, the book can end happily.
Feminist readers might want to challenge this association between un-
happiness and female imagination, which in the moral economy of hap-
piness makes Sophy’s imagination a bad thing. But if we do not operate
in this economy—that is, if we do not assume that happiness is what is
good—then we can read the link between female imagination and un-
happiness differently. We might explore how imagination is what allows
women to be liberated from happiness and the narrowness of its horizons.
We might want girls to read the books that enable them to be over-
whelmed with grief.
Feminism involves political consciousness of what women are asked to
give up for happiness. Indeed, in even becoming conscious of happiness
as loss, feminists have already refused to give up desire, imagination, and
curiosity for happiness. There can be sadness simply in the realization of
what one has given up. Feminist archives are thus full of housewives
becoming conscious of unhappiness as a mood that seems to surround
them: think of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. In the world of the novel,
the feeling is certainly around, almost like a thickness in the air. We sense
the unhappiness seeping through the tasks of the everyday. There she is,
about to get flowers, enjoying her walk in London. During that walk, she
disappears: “But often now this body she wore (she stopped to look at a
Dutch picture), this body, with all its capacities, seemed nothing—nothing
at all. She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown;
there being no more marrying, no more having children now, but only
this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up
Bond street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this
being Mrs. Richard Dalloway” ([1925] 1953, 14).
Becoming Mrs. Dalloway is itself a form of disappearance, following the
paths of life (marriage, reproduction) so that you feel that what is before
you is a kind of solemn progress, as if you are living somebody else’s life,
simply going the same way others are going. If happiness is what allows us
to reach certain points, it is not necessarily how we feel when we get there.
For Mrs. Dalloway, to reach these points is to disappear. The point of
reaching these points seems to be a certain disappearance, a loss of possibility,
a certain failure to make use of the body’s capacities, to find out what it is
that her body can do. To become conscious of possibility can involve mourn-
ing for its loss.
For Clarissa this rather uncanny sensation of becoming Mrs. Dalloway
as a loss of possibility, as an unbecoming or becoming “nothing at all,”
does not enter her consciousness in the form of sadness about something.6
The sadness of the book—and it is a sad book—is not one expressed from
Clarissa’s point of view. Instead, each sentence of the book takes thoughts
and feelings as if they are objects in a shared world: the streets of London,
the very oddness of the occasion of passing others by, a feeling of that
oddness. To coincide can involve a feeling of coincidence, a sense that to
fall in the same time and place as others is a connection to others. As
Clarissa goes out with her task in mind (she has to buy her flowers for
her party), she walks into a world with others. They all might be in their
own world (with their own tasks, their own recollections), and yet they
share the world of the street, if only for a moment, a fleeting moment, a
moment that flees.
If unhappiness creates a collective impression, then it too is made up
of fragments that only loosely attach to points of view. In particular, the
proximity between Mrs. Dalloway and the character of Septimus allows
unhappiness to be shared, even if they do not share their feelings. These
are two characters who do not know each other, though they pass each
other, and yet their worlds are connected by the very jolt of unhappiness.
We have the imminence of the shock of how one person’s suffering can
have ripple effects on the lifeworlds of others. Septimus suffers from shell
shock, and we feel his feelings with him, the panic and sadness as the
horror of war intrudes as memory. His suffering brings the past into the
time of the present, the long time of war, its persistence on the skin as
aftermath, its refusal of an after. And then we observe him from a distance,
where he appears to be a madman, at the edge of respectable sociality, a
spectacle. To encounter him on the street, you would not know the story
behind his suffering. To be near to suffering does not necessarily bring
suffering near.
Clarissa and Septimus, as characters who do not meet, thus achieve an
odd intimacy: the not-just-private suffering of the housewife and the not-
6
Mrs. Dalloway’s stream of consciousness offers itself as a consciousness of death: “Did it
matter, then, she asked herself, as she walked towards Bond Street, did it matter that she must
inevitably cease completely; all this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not
become consoling to believe that death ended?” (12). I am offering my own slant by associating
consciousness of death with consciousness of gender: so Clarissa in becoming Mrs. Dalloway
and in becoming Mrs. Richard Dalloway “must inevitably cease completely.” Feminist histories
show us how following the paths of happiness for women requires a cessation.
would have to go back; the rooms were still crowded; people kept
on coming). They (all day she had been thinking of Bourton, of
Peter, of Sally), they would grow old. A thing there was that mat-
tered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in
her own life, let drop everyday in corruption, lies, chatter. (280–81)
Septimus’s death becomes a question that takes Mrs. Dalloway away from
the party; she attends to his death, wonders about it; she becomes a
retrospective witness even though she was not and could not have been
there. His death becomes material, becomes fleshy through her thought.
His death announces not only that sadness can be unbearable but that
we do not have to bear it, that you can fling it away. And in this moment,
when death intervenes in the life of the party, life becomes chatter, be-
comes what goes on—“they went on living”—what comes and goes: “peo-
ple kept on coming.” It is at this moment, the moment of wondering
about what has happened to a stranger, to someone whom she does not
and will not know, that Mrs. Dalloway becomes conscious of a loss, of
having lost something. The loss is not necessarily her loss but what is lost
when life has become chatter.
What is striking about Mrs. Dalloway is how suffering has to enter her
consciousness from the edges, through the arrival of another, another who
is an intruder, who has not been invited into the room. It is the suffering
of an intruder that exposes the emptiness of life’s chatter. Suffering enters
not as self-consciousness—as a consciousness of one’s own suffering—but
as a heightening of consciousness, a world-consciousness in which the
suffering of those who do not belong is allowed to disturb an atmosphere.
Even when unhappiness is a familiar feeling, it arrives like a stranger to
disturb the familiar or to reveal what is disturbing in the familiar.
The arrival of suffering from the edges of social consciousness might
teach us about the difficulty of becoming conscious of suffering or teach
us about our own resistances to gathering together those seemingly little
uneasy feelings of loss or dissatisfaction into recognition of unhappiness.
The party might expose the need to keep busy, to keep going in the face
of one’s disappearance. So much sadness revealed in the very need to be
busy! So much grief expressed in the need not to be overwhelmed by
grief ! It is hard labor just to recognize sadness and disappointment when
you are living a life that is meant to be happy but simply is not, which is
meant to be full but feels empty. It is difficult to give up an idea of one’s
life when one lives a life according to that idea.
We might say that feminism is an inheritance of the sadness of becoming
conscious not only of gender as the restriction of possibility but also of how
Tensions on the street were high, as they always are in racially mixed
zones of transition. As a very little girl, I remember shrinking from a
particular sound, a hoarsely sharp, guttural rasp, because it often meant
a nasty glob of grey spittle upon my coat or shoe an instant later. My
mother wiped it off with the little pieces of newspaper she always
carried in her purse. Sometimes she fussed about low-class people who
had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter
where they went, impressing upon me that this humiliation was totally
random. It never occurred to me to doubt her. It was not until years
later once in conversation I said to her: “Have you noticed people
don’t spit into the wind so much the way they used to?” And the
look on my mother’s face told me that I had blundered into one of
those secret places of pain that must never be spoken of again. But
it was so typical of my mother when I was young that if she couldn’t
stop white people spitting on her children because they were Black,
she would insist it was something else. (Lorde 1984a, 17–18)
shrinking away from its sound. But the mother cannot bear to speak of
racism and creates an impression that the humiliation is random. Racism
is a pain that is hard to bear. Consciousness of racism becomes retro-
spective, and the question of its timing does matter. You learn not to see
racism as a way of bearing the pain. To see racism, you have to unsee the
world as you learned to see it, the world that covers unhappiness by
covering over its cause. You have to be willing to venture into secret places
of pain.
Some forms of taking cover from pain, of not naming the causes of
pain in the hope that it will go away, are to protect those we love from
being hurt, or even to protect ourselves from hurt, or at least might be
meant as a form of protection. Happiness can also work to conceal the
causes of hurt—or even to make people the cause of their own hurt. In
The Cancer Journals, Lorde offers a powerful critique of the politics of
happiness. She writes as a black lesbian feminist who is experiencing breast
cancer. Lorde never refuses the power of “writing as,” nor does she assume
that it can abbreviate an experience. Faced with a medical discourse that
attributes cancer to unhappiness and survival or coping to being happy
or optimistic, she suggests that “looking on the bright side of things is a
euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consid-
eration of which might prove threatening to the status quo” (1997, 76).
The freedom to be happy can be translated into a freedom to avoid prox-
imity to whatever compromises one’s happiness. The very idea that our
first responsibility is to our own happiness is what allows us to look away:
“Was I really fighting the spread of radiation, racism, woman-slaughter,
chemical invasion of our food, pollution of our environment, and the
abuse and psychic destruction of your young, merely to avoid dealing with
my first and greatest responsibility to be happy?” (76). I think Lorde has
given us the answer to her question.
We can retrieve a model of false consciousness in critiquing claims to
happiness. You would not be saying “You are wrong; you are not happy;
you just think you are because you have a false belief.” Rather, you would
be saying that there is something false about our consciousness of the
world: we learn not to be conscious; we learn not to see what happens
right in front of us. It is not that an individual person suffers from false
consciousness but that we inherit a certain false consciousness when we
learn to see and not to see things in a certain way.
Diversity might offer a happy form of false consciousness. One of the
reasons I decided to write about happiness was as a result of the project
I completed on diversity in which I interviewed diversity workers in twenty
universities in Australia and the United Kingdom, asking them about how
they worked with the languages of diversity. Many practitioners were skep-
tical about the appeal of this term, as we can see in the following quotation:
“So now we’ll talk about diversity, and that means everybody’s different
but equal and its all nice and cuddly and we can feel good about it and
feel like we’ve solved it when actually we’re nowhere near solving it, and
I think that diversity as a concept fits in much better with the university’s
idea of what it’s doing about being the great benefactor.”7 Diversity pride
becomes a form of organizational pride. Saying “we are diverse” allows
the concealment of racism and inequalities within organizations. Another
practitioner describes it like this: “Diversity obscures the issues. . . . It is
like a big shiny red apple, right, and it all looks wonderful . . . [but] if
you actually cut into that apple there’s a rotten core in there and you
know that it’s actually all rotting away and it’s not actually being addressed.
It all looks wonderful, but the inequalities aren’t being addressed.”
The arrival of people of color into organizations of whiteness thus
involves a happiness duty: we have to embody their commitment to di-
versity by smiling in their brochures. The happiness duty is also a negative
duty not to speak about racism in the present. I learned from this project
how diversity-proud organizations are often the ones that defend hardest
against hearing about racism. It is as if speaking about racism is to intro-
duce bad feelings into organizations; it is as if you hurt or bruise the ego
ideal of the organization as being diverse.
You cause unhappiness by revealing the causes of unhappiness. And
you can become the cause of the unhappiness you reveal. In becoming
an unhappiness-cause, one can certainly be affected unhappily. People
often say that the struggle against racism is like banging your head against
a brick wall. The wall keeps its place, so it is you who gets sore. Struggling
against racism means being willing to labor over sore points. Not only do
we need to labor our points, as a laboring over sore points, but we also
might even need to stay as sore as our points. Of course that is not all
we say or we do. We can recognize not only that we are not the cause of
the unhappiness that has been attributed to us but also the effects of being
attributed as the cause. We can talk about being angry black women or
feminist killjoys; we can claim those figures back; we can talk about those
7
The interviews took place between 2003 and 2005 in Australian and British universities
and were part of a wider project assessing the turn to diversity within the learning and skills
sector (including adult and community learning and further education), as well as higher ed-
ucation. Interviewees gave their consent on condition of anonymity; thus, their names have
not been included here. I was codirector of this project with Elaine Swan, and the team of
researchers included Shona Hunter, Sevgi Kilic, and Lewis Turner. For a paper detailing findings,
see Ahmed (2007).
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