The Promise of Happiness is a provocative cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. It asks what follows when we make our desires and even our own happiness conditional on the happiness of others: “I just want you to be happy”; “I’m happy if you’re happy.” Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, Sara Ahmed reveals the affective and moral work performed by the “happiness duty,” the expectation that we will be made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy. Ahmed maintains that happiness is a promise that directs us toward certain life choices and away from others. Happiness is promised to those willing to live their lives in the right way.

Ahmed draws on the intellectual history of happiness, from classical accounts of ethics as the good life, through seventeenth-century writings on affect and the passions, eighteenth-century debates on virtue and education, and nineteenth-century utilitarianism. She engages with feminist, antiracist, and queer critics who have shown how happiness is used to justify social oppression, and how challenging oppression causes unhappiness. Reading novels and films including Mrs. Dalloway, The Well of Loneliness, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, Ahmed considers the plight of the figures who challenge and are challenged by the attribution of happiness to particular objects or social ideals: the feminist killjoy, the unhappy queer, the angry black woman, and the melancholic migrant. Through her readings she raises critical questions about the moral order imposed by the injunction to be happy.

The Promise of Happiness

Benedict Anderson’s deservedly famous thesis about the origins and nature
of modern nationalism turns around the central notion of an “imagined
community.” This category provides him with a matrix out of which one
can apprehend-theoretically and historically-the different variants of nationalist discourse formulated over the last two hundred years. We will refer,
in the brief comments that follow, to three basic dimensions structuring
the fabric of Anderson’s argument: 1) the presuppositions implicit in the
notion of an “imagined” community; 2) the kind of substitutability or solidarity which is required to be a member of such a community; 3) the kind
of relationship that is established between such a community-which is by
definition finite or limited-and its outside. Before that, however, let us
describe the main features of Anderson’s thesis.

On Imagined Communities

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

As thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the fatal police shooting of unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown in the summer of 2014, news and commentary on the shooting, the protests, and the militarized response that followed circulated widely through social media networks. Through a theorization of hashtag usage, we discuss how and why social media platforms have become powerful sites for documenting and challenging episodes of police brutality and the misrepresentation of racialized bodies in mainstream media. We show how engaging in “hashtag activism” can forge a shared political temporality, and, additionally, we examine how social media platforms can provide strategic outlets for contesting and reimagining the materiality of racialized bodies. Our analysis combines approaches from linguistic anthropology and social movements research to investigate the semiotics of digital protest and to interrogate both the possibilities and the pitfalls of engaging in “hashtag ethnography.”

https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/amet.12112

#Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States

/pdf/imperial-leather-race-gender-and-sexuality-in-the-colonial-e5g9c51q0j.pdf

Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest

Preface ix Acknowledgments xxv Introduction: Queer and Not Now 1 1 Junk Inheritances, Bad Timing: Familial Arrhythmia in Three Working-Class Dyke Narratives 21 2 Deep Lez: Temporal Drag and the Specters of Feminism 59 3 Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography 95 4 Turn the Beat Around: Sadomasochism, Temporality, History 137 Coda 171 Appendix: Distributors for Films and Videos 175 Notes 177 Bibliography 193 Index 209

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

This roundtable took place via e-mail in March, April, and May of 2006. Participants wrote in clusters of three, sending their remarks back to me to be collated and sent on to the next cluster for a total of three rounds of comments. I edited the results for continuity, occasionally shifting a remark to an “earlier” or “later” place in the conversation, cutting digressions, or adding transitions. Thus the temporality, polyvocality, and virtual space of this production are quite different than a real-time, face-to-face roundtable would have been: perhaps this is fitting for a special issue on queer temporalities. My deepest gratitude goes to all the scholars and critics who participated and to J. Samaine Lockwood and Kara Thompson for copyediting assistance. — Elizabeth Freeman

Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion

At the national level, the struggle over control of meaning concerns making people's life constructions coterminous with periodizations given by the state. Years ago now, writing about interactions between individuals and small-scale social groups, Pierre Bourdieu declared that strategies of power consist of \" playing on the time, or rather the tempo, of the action, \" mainly through managing delay and surprise. 1 Yet this chronopolitics extends beyond local conflicts to the management of entire populations: both the state and the market produce biopolitical status relations not only through borders, the establishment of private and public zones, and other strategies of spatial containment, but also and crucially through temporal mechanisms. Some groups have their needs and freedoms deferred or snatched away, and some don't. Some cultural practices are given the means to continue; others are squelched or allowed to die on the vine. Some events count as historically significant, some don't; some are cho-reographed as such from the first instance and thereby overtake others. Most intimately, some human experiences officially count as a life or one of its parts, and some don't. Those forced to wait or startled by violence, whose activities do not show up on the official time line, whose own time lines do not synchronize with it, are variously and often simultaneously black, female, queer. More specifically, as numerous scholars have recognized, bourgeois-liberal entities from nations to individuals are defined within a narrow chronopolitics of development at once racialized, gendered, and sexual-ized. Western \" modernity, \" for instance, has represented its own forward movement against a slower premodernity figured as brown-skinned, feminine , and erotically perverse. 2 On the material level, large-scale periodiz-ing mechanisms have shaped what can be lived as a social formation, or an individual life. To take only one example: even before the hourly wage had quantified time, the colonial state intervened early into temporal-ity, inscribing itself into and as the bodies of \" the people \" directly via the calendar, skewing indigenous rhythms of sacred and profane and

Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography

As a graduate student teaching my first solo course in Lesbian and Gay Studies in 1993, at a moment when “identity” was rapidly morphing into cross-gender identification, I told an anecdote I thought would illustrate this crossing: “I wear this T-shirt that says ‘Big Fag’ sometimes, because lesbians give potlucks and dykes fix cars. I’ve never done well at either, so ‘Big Fag’ feels more appropriate.” A student came to see me in office hours, quite upset. She was in her early twenties, a few years younger than I, but she dressed like my feminist teachers had in college. She stood before me in Birkenstocks, wool socks, jeans, and a women’s music T-shirt, and declared that she felt dismissed and marginalized by my comment, that lesbians-who-givepotlucks described her exactly, and that I had clearly fashioned a more interesting identity with her own as a foil. I had thought I was telling a story about being inadequate to prevailing lesbian identity-forms, or about allying with gay men, or perhaps even about the lack of representational choices for signaling femme. But it turned out that I was telling a story about anachronism, with “lesbian” as the sign of times gone by and her body as an implicit teaching text. Momentarily displaced into my own history of feeling chastised by feminisms that preceded me, yet aware that this student had felt disciplined by my joke in much the same way, I apologized, and a long conversation about identification between students and teachers followed. But what interests me now is the way that student’s self-presentation

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v031/31.4freeman.pdf

Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations

In The Wedding Complex Elizabeth Freeman explores the significance of the wedding ceremony by asking what the wedding becomes when you separate it from the idea of marriage. Freeman finds that weddings—as performances, fantasies, and rituals of transformation—are sites for imagining and enacting forms of social intimacy other than monogamous heterosexuality. Looking at the history of Anglo-American weddings and their depictions in American literature and popular culture from the antebellum era to the present, she reveals the cluster of queer desires at the heart of the "wedding complex"—longings not for marriage necessarily but for public forms of attachment, ceremony, pageantry, and celebration.

Freeman draws on queer theory and social history to focus on a range of texts where weddings do not necessarily lead to legal marriage but instead reflect yearnings for intimate arrangements other than long-term, state-sanctioned, domestic couplehood. Beginning with a look at the debates over gay marriage, she proceeds to consider literary works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with such Hollywood films as Father of the Bride , The Graduate , and The Godfather . She also discusses less well-known texts such as Su Friedrich’s experimental film First Comes Love and the off-Broadway, interactive dinner play Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding .

Offering bold new ways to imagine attachment and belonging, and the public performance and recognition of social intimacy, The Wedding Complex is a major contribution to American studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.

Elizabeth Freeman

Papers

Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories

Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion

Time Binds, or, Erotohistoriography

Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations

The Wedding Complex: Forms of Belonging in Modern American Culture