Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects) by Sara Ahmed
and while Iâm here, this part has also felt very relevant as of late:
The figure of the feminist killjoy makes sense if we place her in the context of feminist critiques of happiness, of how happiness is used to justify social norms as social goods (a social good is what causes happiness, given happiness is understood as what is good). As Simone de Beauvoir described so astutely âit is always easy to describe as happy a situation in which one wishes to place [others].â[4] Not to agree to stay in the place of this wish might be to refuse the happiness that is wished for. To be involved in political activism is thus to be involved in a struggle against happiness. Even if we are struggling for different things, even if we have different worlds we want to create, we might share what we come up against. Our activist archives are thus unhappy archives. Just think of the labor of critique that is behind us: feminist critiques of the figure of âthe happy housewife;â Black critiques of the myth of âthe happy slaveâ; queer critiques of the sentimentalisation of heterosexuality as âdomestic bliss.â The struggle over happiness provides the horizon in which political claims are made. We inherit this horizon.
