Summary of 11\/14
\nWe began class with the mood check, as usual, before moving on to a discussion of the final project. We talked through expectations for a while, before moving on to the summary.
\n\tThe summary provoked a pretty deep dive into what exactly Ahmed thinks we should do about happiness. She thinks that all happiness consists of is an empty promise, a fantasy of a perfect future that will never arrive. Happiness is a hole in ourselves that can never be filled, or perhaps the idea of happiness creates that hole, futilely. Wallace had asked what, if we give up all hope for happiness and embrace pessimism, should we do? It seems like Ahmed has no solution or brighter future to offer, she can only say that the pessimist understands the real, sad nature of the world, which is somehow better than the anxiety emptiness associated with the pursuit of happiness.
\n\tWe then discussed the reading for that class, Chapter 2: Feminist Killjoys. The main concept of the Feminist Killjoy is based on an understanding of Affect. Others\u2019 happiness is based on your behavior. An example she gives is that the husband\u2019s happiness is dependent on the domestic effort put in by the housewife. Her happiness is not taken into account at all. Ahmed notes that we often try to deceive ourselves into thinking that we are happy based on the happiness of others, hiding our unhappiness within the happiness of our loved ones. This is ultimately futile, however, as the feminist realizes. She \u2018kills joy\u2019 in a very literal sense by bringing up latent bad feeling that have hitherto been concealed Not her joy, that of those around her. This is further deepened by the concept of the \u2018affect alien\u2019, when a person feels different or foreign because of their differing views. They react in the \u2018wrong way\u2019 to the \u2018right\u2019 things. Happiness ends up being a kind of violence, in which one must submit for another to be \u2018happy\u2019.
\n\tWe ended the class discussing whether or not any of this was fixable on a cultural\/individual level. Most of the discussion was centered around whether we could reprogram ourselves to not want certain things from others in order to be happy, to truly view men and women as equals, etc. We didn\u2019t end up with any concrete answers, just some arguments either way. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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