Happiness and Queer Politics1
[pdf]
Sara Ahmed
“You might have a good story there,” Dick said, “but … you cannot make
homosexuality attractive. No happy ending…” In other words, my heroine has to
decide she’s not really queer”… “That’s it. And the one she’s involved with is
sick or crazy.” —Vin Packer
In this exchange Vin Packer, author of the first best
selling lesbian pulp novel Spring Fire first published in 1952, comes to an agreement with her publisher. The novel
will be published, but only on condition that it does not have a happy ending,
as such an ending would “make homosexuality attractive.”2 Queer fiction in this period could not give happiness to its characters as queers; such a gift would be readable
as making queers appear “good”: as the “promotion” of the social value of queer
lives; or an attempt to influence readers to become queer.
Somewhat ironically, then, the unhappy ending becomes a political gift:
it provides a means through which queer fiction could be published. If the
unhappy ending was an effect of censorship, it also provided a means for
overcoming censorship. So although Packer expresses regret for the compromise
of its ending in her introduction to the new issue of Spring Fire published in 2004, she also suggests that while it “may
have satisfied the post office inspections, the homosexual audience would not
have believed it for a minute. But they also wouldn’t care that much, because
more important was the fact there was a new book about us.”3 The unhappy ending satisfies the censors whilst also enabling the gay and
lesbian audience to be satisfied; we are not obliged to “believe” in the
unhappy ending by taking the ending literally, as “evidence” that lesbians and
gays must turn straight, die or go mad. What mattered was the existence of “a
new book about us.”
We can see that reading unhappy endings in queer archives is a
complicated matter. A literal reading suggests that the very distinction
between happy and unhappy endings “works” to secure a moral distinction between
good and bad lives. When we read this unhappy queer archive (which is not the
only queer archive) we must resist this literalism, which means an active
disbelief in the necessary alignment of the happy with the good, or even in the
moral transparency of the good itself. Rather than reading unhappy endings as a
sign of the withholding of a moral approval for queer lives, we would consider
how unhappiness circulates within and around this archive, and what it allows us to do.
My aim in this essay is to consider unhappy queers as a crucial aspect
of queer genealogy. As Heather Love has argued “We need a genealogy of queer
affect that does not overlook the negative, shameful and difficult feelings
that have been so central to queer existence in the last century.”4 Scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn and Sally Munt have
offered us powerful defenses of the potentialities of shame for queer politics.
5I will consider what it might mean to affirm unhappiness, or at least not to
overlook it. We can explore how queer
literatures locate and attribute unhappiness and how, in doing so, they offer
us an alternative approach to happiness as a positive, but perhaps still rather
difficult, feeling.6
In rethinking happiness through queer politics, I turn to the classic
novel The Well of Loneliness. Lisa
Walker has argued that “The Well’s
status as the lesbian novel is
inseparable from its reputation as the
most depressing lesbian novel ever written.”7 The Well has even been described as a
“narrative of damnation,” which gives “the homosexual, particularly the
lesbian, riddling images of pity, self-pity and of terror.”8 The book has been criticized for making its readers feel sad and wretched,
perhaps even causing queer unhappiness. I would not dismiss such criticisms:
they are part of our shared archive. Indeed, the very expression of unhappiness about unhappiness is what makes this
archive work; the threads of negative affect weave together a shared
inheritance. We can, of course, inherit unhappiness differently. I will read
novels such as The Well of Loneliness as part of a genealogy of unhappy queers. I will also consider how being happily queer might involve a different
orientation to the causes of unhappiness, by reflecting on the novels Rubyfruit Jungle and Babyji.
Happy Objects
Happiness is about what happens, where the what is something good. I do not assume there is something called
happiness that stands apart or has autonomy, as if it corresponds to an object
in the world. I begin instead with the messiness of the experiential, the
unfolding of bodies into worlds, and what I called in Queer Phenomenology the drama of contingency, how we are touched by
what we are near.
9 The etymology of “happiness” relates precisely to the question of contingency:
it is from the Middle English “hap,” suggesting chance. Happiness is about what
happens. Such a meaning now seems archaic: we may be more used to thinking of
happiness as an effect of what you do, as a reward for hard work, rather than
as being “simply” what happens to you. But I find the original meaning useful,
as it focuses our attention on the “worldly” question of happenings.
What
is the relation between the “what” in “what happens” and the “what” that makes
us happy? Empiricism provides us with a useful way of addressing this question,
given its concern with “what’s what.” Take the work of seventeenth century
empiricist philosopher John Locke. He argues that what is good is what is “apt
to cause or increase pleasure, or diminish pain in us.”10 We
judge something to be good or bad according to how it affects us, whether it
gives us a pleasure or pain. Locke uses the example of the man that loves
grapes. He argues that “when a man declares…that he loves grapes, it is no
more, but that the taste of grapes delights him.”11 Locke
points out that we find different things agreeable. As he suggests: “as
pleasant tastes depend not on the things themselves, but their agreeability to
this or that palate, wherein there is great variety; so the greatest happiness
consists in having those things which produce the greatest pleasure.”12 For
Locke, happiness is idiosyncratic: if we find different things delightful, then
happiness consists in having different things.
At one level, Locke’s story seems quite casual.
I happen upon something, and if it happens to affect me in a good way, then it
is happy for me, or I am happy with it. I want to suggest that the history of
happiness is not quite so casual: one history of happiness is the history of
the removal of the hap from happiness. Happiness becomes not what might happen,
but what will happen if you live your life in the right way. That happiness can
signal a “right way” suggests that happiness is already given to certain
objects. We can arrive at some
things because they point us toward
happiness, as if to find happiness would be to follow their point.
Objects
can thus be associated with affects before they are even encountered. We need
to rethink the relationship between objects, affects and causality. In The Will to Power, Nietzsche suggests
that the attribution of causality is retrospective.13 We might assume then, that the experience of pain is caused by the nail near
our foot. But we only notice the nail given we experience an affect. The object of feeling lags behind the feeling. The lag
is not simply temporal, but involves active forms of mediation. We search for
the object: or as Nietzsche describes “a reason is sought in persons,
experiences, etc. for why one feels this way or that.”14
We can loosen the bond between the object and the
affect by recognizing the form of their bond. The object is understood
retrospectively as the cause of the
feeling. Having been understood in this way, I can just apprehend the nail and
I will experience a pain affect, given the association between the object and
the affect has been given. The object becomes a feeling-cause. Once an object
is a feeling-cause, it can cause feeling, so that when we feel the feeling we
expect to feel, we are affirmed. The retrospective causality of affect that
Nietzsche describes quickly converts into what we could call an anticipatory causality. We can even
anticipate an affect without being retrospective insofar as objects might
acquire the value of proximities that are not derived from our own experience.
For example, with fear-causes, a child might be told not to go near an object
in advance of its arrival. Some things more than others are encountered as
“to-be-feared” in the event of proximity, which is exactly how we can
understood the anticipatory logic of the discourse of stranger danger.15
We also anticipate that an object will cause
happiness in advance of its arrival; the object enters our near sphere with
positive affective value already in place. What makes this argument different from John Locke’s account of loving
grapes because they taste delightful is that the judgment about certain objects
as being “happy” is already made before we happen upon them. Indeed, we might
happen upon things because they are
already attributed as happiness causes. So the child might be asked to imagine
happiness by imagining “happy events” in the future, such as a wedding day,
“the happiest day of your life.”
Perhaps
this day happens because it is expected to be the happiest. We can just expect
happiness from this or that to end up feeling disappointed. Arlie Russell
Hoshchild, in her book The Managed Heart,
explores how if a bride is not happy on the wedding day and even feels
“depressed and upset” then she is experiencing an “inappropriate affect,”16 or is being affected inappropriately. The bride has 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.”17 The capacity to “save the day” depends on the bride being able to make her self
be affected in the right way or at least being able to persuade others that she
is being affected in the right way. When it can be said “the bride looked
happy” then the expectation of happiness has become the happiness of
expectation. To correct our feelings is to become disaffected from a former
affectation: the bride makes herself happy by stopping herself 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 you are in.
The
apparent chanciness of happiness can be qualified: we do not just find happy
objects anywhere. For a life to count as a good life, then it must return the
debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which
means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life
course. Happiness might be how we reach such points, though it is not
necessarily how we feel when we get there.
We are
directed by happiness toward certain things. The promise of happiness takes
this form: if you have this or have that, or if you do this or do that, then
happiness is what follows. Lauren Berlant usefully suggests that the object of
desire could be rethought as a “cluster of promises.”18 Happiness is promised through proximity to certain objects, which might be how
objects cluster, becoming promising, becoming proximate. This is why the social
bond is always sensational. We have a bond if we place our hopes for happiness
in the same things.
Objects
that promise happiness are passed around, accumulating positive affective value
as social goods. When we pass happy objects around, it is not necessarily the
feeling that passes. To share in such objects, or have a share in such objects,
means simply that you share an
orientation toward those objects as being good. Take the example of the
happy family. The family might be happy not because it causes happiness, or not
even because it affects us in a good way, but if we share an orientation toward
the family as being good, as being what promises happiness in return for
loyalty. Such an orientation shapes what we do; you have to “make” and “keep”
the family, which directs how you spend your time, energy and resources. Being oriented toward the family might make certain
kinds of things proximate: tables, photographs, objects that are passed down
through generations. The table, for example, gives form to the family, as the
tangible thing over which the family gathers.19 The table is happy when it secures this point.
To be oriented toward the family does not mean
inhabiting the same place. After all, as we know from Locke, pleasures can be
idiosyncratic. Families may give one a sense of having “a place at the table”
through the conversion of idiosyncratic difference into a happy object: love
“happily” means knowing the peculiarity of a loved other’s likes. Love
becomes an intimacy with what the other likes (rather than simply liking what
the other likes), and is given on condition that such likes do not take us
outside a shared horizon. The horizon of
happiness is a horizon of likes.
Sharing a
horizon is not necessarily to feel alike. Think about experiences of
alienation. When we feel pleasure from
happy objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. We become alienated—out
of line with an affective community—when we are not happy in proximity to
objects that are attributed as being good. The gap between the affective value of an object and how we experience
an object can involve a range of affects, which are directed by the modes of
explanation we offer to fill this gap. I have already commented on the labor of
trying to close the gap between an expectation and a feeling. When we cannot
close the gap, we are disappointed; we are even disappointed by our inability
to overcome our disappointment. Such disappointment can also involve an anxious
narrative of self-doubt (why I am not made happy by this, what is wrong with
me?) or (my own preferred response) 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
spill out toward those who promised you happiness through the elevation of such
things as good. We become strangers, or
affect aliens, in such moments.
What
passes when we pass happy objects around will remain an open and empirical
question. After all, the word “passing” can mean not only “to send over” or “to
transmit,” but also to transform objects by “a sleight of hand.” Like the game
Telephone, what passes between proximate bodies might be affective precisely because
it deviates and even perverts what was “sent out.” Affects involve perversion;
and what we can describe as conversion points.
One of my
key questions is how such conversions happen, and “who” or “what” gets seen as
converting bad feeling into good feeling and good into bad. When I hear people
say “the bad feeling” is coming from “this person” or “that person” I am never
convinced. I am sure a lot of my skepticism is shaped by childhood experiences
of being the feminist daughter in a conventional family home. 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 find problematic. You respond carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking
quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,” recognizing with frustration
that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. Let us take
seriously the figure of the feminist killjoy. 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? The
feminist is an affect alien; not only is she not made happy by the objects that
are supposed to cause happiness, but her failure to be happy is read as
sabotaging the happiness of others.
We can place the figure of the feminist kill
joy alongside the angry black woman, explored by black feminist writers such as
Audre Lorde and bell hooks.20 The angry black woman could also be described as a kill-joy; she may even kill
feminist joy, for example, by pointing out forms of racism within feminist
politics. bell hooks describes for us how the arrival of a woman of color disturbs a shared atmosphere: “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.”21
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
presumed organic enjoyment and solidarity. The body of color is attributed as
the cause of becoming tense, which is also the loss of a shared atmosphere.
hooks shows how as a feminist of color you do not even have to say anything to
cause tension. The mere proximity of some bodies involves an affective
conversion. To get along you have to go along with things that might mean for
some not even being able to enter the room. We learn from this example how
histories are condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the
tangibility of the bodies that seem always to “get in the way” of the happiness
of others.
Making Others Happy
Robert Heinlin’s definition of love
“is a condition in which the happiness of another is essential to your own”.22 It
is perhaps a truism that to love another is to want their happiness. Whether or
not we agree with this truth, we can learn from its status as truth. I want to
turn to a text from the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s Émile, first published in
1762, which was crucial for how it re-defined education and for the role it
gave to happiness. The story is told in the first person, by a narrator whose
duty is to instruct a young orphan Émile, in order that he can take up his
place in the world. Rousseau also offers a model not only of what a good
education would do for his Emile, but also for Émile’s would-be wife, Sophy,
whom he introduces in the fifth book. Sophie must become a good woman. As
Rousseau describes, the good woman:
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, unhappiness, 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!23
The complexity of this statement should not be
underestimated. She loves virtue as it is the road to happiness; unhappiness
and disgrace follow from being bad. The good woman loves what is good because what
is good is what is loved by her parents. The parents desire not only what is
good; they desire their daughter to be good. The daughter desires to be good to
give them what they desire. For her to be happy, she must be good, as being
good is what makes them happy, and she can only be happy if they are happy.
It might seem that what we can call
“conditional happiness,” when one person’s happiness is made conditional on
another person’s, involves a form of generosity: a refusal to
have a share in a happiness that cannot be shared. And yet the
terms of conditionality are unequal. If certain people come first—we might say
those who are already in place (such as parents, hosts or citizens)—then their
happiness comes first. For those who are positioned as coming after, happiness means following somebody else’s
goods.
I suggested earlier that we might share a
social bond if the same objects make us happy. I am now arguing that happiness
itself can become the shared object. Or
to be more precise, if one person’s happiness comes first, then their happiness becomes a shared object.
Max Scheler’s differentiation between communities of feeling and fellow-feeling
might help explain the significance of this argument. In communities of
feeling, we share feelings because we share the same object of feeling.
Fellow-feeling would be when I feel sorrow about your grief although I do not
share your object of grief: “all fellow-feeling involves intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other
person’s experience.”24 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. Your
happiness is with x. If I share x, then your happiness and my happiness is not
only shared, but can accumulate through being given out and 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: 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 might take up what makes you happy as what makes me happy, which may
involve compromising my own idea of happiness (so I will go along with x in
order to make you happy even if x does not “really” make me happy). In order to
preserve the happiness of all, we might even conceal from ourselves our
unhappiness with x, or try and persuade ourselves that x matters less than the
happiness of the other who is made happy by x.25
We have a hint of the rather uneasy dynamics of
conditional happiness in Emile. For
Sophy wanting to make her parents happy commits her in a certain direction,
regardless of what she might or might not want. 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: “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.”26 For the daughter not to go along with the parent’s desire for marriage would be
not only to cause her parents unhappiness, but would threaten the very
reproduction 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.
We learn
from reading books such as Emile how
much happiness is used as a technology or instrument, which allows the re-orientation
of individual desire towards a common good. We also learn from reading such
books how happiness is not simply instrumental, but works as an idea or
aspiration within everyday life, shaping the very terms in which individuals
share their world with others. We do things when we speak of happiness, when we
put happiness into words.
Let’s take
the statement: I am happy if you are.
Such a statement can be attributed, as a way of sharing an evaluation of an
object. I could be saying I am happy about something if you are happy about
something. The statement, though, does not require an object to mediate between
the “I” and the “you”; the “you” can be the object, can be what my happiness is
dependent upon. I will only be happy if
you are. To say I will be happy only if you are happy means that I will be
unhappy if you are unhappy. Your
unhappiness would make me unhappy. Given this, you might be obliged to
conceal your unhappiness to preserve my happiness: You must be happy for me.
I am not saying that such speech acts always translate in quite this
way. But we can learn from how the desire for the happiness of others can be
the point at which they are bound to be happy for us. If to love another is to
want their happiness, then love might be experienced as the duty to be happy
for another. It is interesting that when we speak of wanting the happiness of the loved
other we often hesitate with the signifier “just.” “I just want you to be happy.” What does it mean to want “just” happiness?
What does it mean for a parent to say this to a child? We might assume that the
desire just for the child’s happiness would offer a certain kind of freedom, as
if to say: “I don’t want you to be this, or to do that; I just want you to be
or to do “whatever” makes you happy.” You could say that the “whatever” seems
to release us from the obligation of the “what”. The desire just for the
child’s happiness seems to offer the freedom of a certain indifference to the
content of a decision.
Let’s take the psychic drama of the queer
child. You might say that the queer child is an unhappy object for many
parents. In some parental responses to the child coming out, this unhappiness
is not so much expressed as being unhappy about the child being queer, but as being unhappy about the child being unhappy.
Take the following exchange from the novel, Annie
on My Mind (1982) by Nancy Garden:
“Lisa”, my father said, “I told you I’d support you and I will….But
honey… I have to say to you I’ve never thought gay people can be very happy—no
children for one thing, no real family life. Honey, you are probably going to
be a very good architect – but I want you to be happy in other ways, too, as
your mother is, to have a husband and children. I know you can do both….” I am happy, I tried to tell him with my
eyes. I’m happy with Annie; she and my
work are all I’ll ever need; she’s happy too—we both were until this happened.27
This speech act functions powerfully. The parent makes an act of
identification with an imagined future of necessary and inevitable unhappiness.
Such identification through grief about what the child will lose, reminds us
that the queer life is already constructed as an unhappy life, as a life
without the “things” that make you happy: a husband and children. The desire for the child’s happiness is far from
indifferent. The speech act, “I just want you to be happy” is directive at the very
point of its imagined indifference.
For the daughter, it is only the eyes that can
speak; and they try to tell an alternative story about happiness and
unhappiness. In her response, she claims happiness, for sure. She is happy “with Annie”; which is to say, she is
happy with this relationship and this life that it will commit her to.
The power of the unspoken response is lodged in the use of the word “until”: we
were happy “until” this happened. The father’s speech act creates the very
affective state of unhappiness that is imagined to be the inevitable
consequence of the daughter’s decision. When “this” happens, unhappiness does
follow.
The social struggle within families is often a
struggle over the causes of unhappiness. The father is unhappy as he thinks the
daughter will be unhappy if she is queer. The daughter is unhappy as the father
is unhappy with her being queer. The father witnesses the daughter’s
unhappiness as a sign of the truth of his position: she will be unhappy because
she is queer. Even the happy queer becomes unhappy at
this point. And clearly the family can only be maintained as a happy object, as
being what is anticipated to cause happiness, by making the unhappiness of the
queer child its point.
The speech act “I just want you to
be happy” can be used as a form of tolerance or acceptance in coming out
stories. A contrasting example to Annie
on My Mind was presented in Dana’s story of coming out to her parents in The L Word. After trying to persuade her
daughter to give up desire for duty, her mother eventually says: “I can see that you’ve found love. It doesn’t matter
what form it takes as long as it makes you happy”.
It is always paradoxical to say something does not matter: when you have
to say something does not matter it usually implies that it does. Recognition
can withdraw the approval it gives. What does it mean for recognition to be
made conditional on happiness? I have suggested that some things more than
others are attributed as happiness causes. In this occasion, the couple are
asking for parental blessing of their marriage: a straight way of doing queer
love, perhaps. If queers, in order to be recognized, have to the approximate
signs of happiness, then they might have to minimize signs of queerness. In
other words, being turned by happiness can mean being turned toward the social
forms in which hopes for happiness have already been deposited. One thinks of
the final film in If These Walls Could
Talk 2 (2000, dir. Anne Heche): the happy image in the end is of a white middle-class lesbian
couple who are pregnant: they dance around their immaculate house, and
everything seems to shimmer with its nearness to ordinary scenes of happy
domesticity. Their happiness amounts to achieving relative proximity to the
good life.28 If this is a form of optimism, then it might be a “cruel optimism” as Laurent
Berlant describes so well. You follow certain ways of life in the hope that you
will catch happiness on the way, even if, or perhaps more cruelly, even
because, they embody the scenes of past rejection.
You can
see why we might want to embrace the figure of the unhappy queer, rather than
placing our hopes in an alternative figure of the happy queer. The unhappy
queer is unhappy with the world that reads queers as unhappy. The risk of
promoting happy queers is that the unhappiness of this world could disappear
from view. Take some of the responses to the Canadian lesbian film, Lost and Delirious, released in 2001 (directed
by Léa Pool). In the film, two girls fall in love. One cannot bear giving up on the
life promised by acceptance into heterosexuality, so she gives up her love. The
other cannot bear life without her love so gives up her life. Critics described
the film as “dated.” One critic even suggests the film is “time-warped,” as if
it is twisted out of shape in its representation of something that is no
longer.29
The
implication of such descriptions is that queers can now come out, be accepted
and be happy. The good faith in queer progression can be a form of bad faith.
Those of us committed to queer life know that forms of recognition are either
precariously conditional—you have to be the right kind of queer by depositing
your hope for happiness in the right places—or it is simply not given. Not only
is recognition not given, but it is often not given in places that are not
noticeable to those who do not need to be recognized, which helps sustain the
illusion that it is given (which, in turn, means if you say that it has not
been given, you are read as paranoid). Indeed, the illusion that same sex
object choices have become accepted and acceptable (that civil partnerships
mean queer civility) both conceals
the ongoing realities of discrimination, non-recognition and violence, and
requires that we approximate the straight signs of civility. We must stay unhappy with this world.
The recognition of queers can be narrated as the hope
or promise of becoming acceptable, where in being acceptable you must become acceptable to a world that has already decided what is acceptable. Recognition becomes a gift given from the straight
world to queers, which conceals long histories of queer labor and struggle,30 the life worlds generated by queer activism, which has created a “place at the
table” in the hope that the table won’t keep its place. It is as if such
recognition is a form of straight hospitality, which in turn positions happy
queers as guests in other people’s homes, reliant on their continuing good
will. In such a world you are asked to be grateful for the bits and pieces that
you are given. To be a guest is to experience a moral obligation to be on “your
best behavior” such that to refuse to fulfill this obligation would be to
threaten your right to co-existence. The happy queer, the one who has good
manners, who is seated at the table in the right way, might be a strategic form
of occupying an uncivil world. But strategic occupations can keep things in
place. Or we can keep in place by the effort of an occupation. I think we know
this.
There are of course good reasons for telling
stories about queer happiness, in response and as a response to the presumption
that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an unhappy life.31 We just have to hear the violence of Michael’s tragic comment, “show me a happy homosexual and I’ll show you a
gay corpse” from Matt Crowley’s 1968 play, “The Boys in the Band” to be
reminded of these reasons.32 And yet, at the same time, and perhaps even for the same reasons, we can see
why telling stories about queer unhappiness might matter. Being attributed as the cause of unhappiness has
unhappy effects. It might be the pain of not being recognized. It might be the
conditions of recognition. It might even be the work required to counter the
perception of your life as unhappy: the very pressure to be happy in order to
show that you are not unhappy can create unhappiness, to be sure.
Unhappiness and Deviation
Happiness
scripts are powerful even when we fail or refuse to follow them, when our
desires deviate from their straight lines. In this way, the scripts speak a
certain truth: deviation can involve unhappiness. The “whole world” it might
seem depends on your being directed in the right way, towards the right kind of
things. The unhappiness of the deviant has a powerful function as a perverse
promise (if you do this, you will get that!), a promise that simultaneously
offers a threat (so don’t do that!). To deviate is always to risk a world even
when you don’t lose the world you risk. Queer histories are the histories of
those who are willing to risk the consequences of deviation.
The history of the word “unhappy” teaches us about the
unhappiness of the history of happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant
“causing misfortune or trouble.” Only later, did it come to mean “miserable in
lot or circumstances” or “wretched in mind.” 33 We can learn from the swiftness of the translation
between being attributed as the cause of 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 their 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, 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 happiness of the familiar.
It is hard when your very arrival into the
world becomes the cause of unhappiness. We could take any number of sad queer
books and they would show us this. Take The
Well of Loneliness. The book tells the story of Stephen, described
throughout as an invert, whose life hurtles towards “the tragic and miserable
ending” which seems the only available plot for inversion.34 Throughout the novel,
Stephen has a series of tragic and doomed love affairs, ending with her
relationship with Mary Lewellyn, described as “the child, the friend, the belovèd,”35. The novel does not give
us a happy ending, and this seems partly its point: Stephen gives up Mary as a
way of relieving her from the burden of their love.
Every sad book has its moments, the moments
when it is all “too much,” when a life, a body, a world, becomes unbearable.
Turning points are usually breaking points. A key turning point in the novel is when Stephen and Mary arrive at
Alec’s bar, a space in which the “miserable army” of the inverted and perverted
reside. Stephen is approached by Adolphe Blanc, a “gentle and learned Jew.” He
says to her:
In this little room, tonight, every night, there is so much misery, so
much despair that the walls seem almost too narrow to contain it. Yet outside
there are happy people who sleep, the sleep of the so-called just and
righteous. When they wake it will be to persecute those who, through no fault
of their own, have been set apart from the day of their birth, deprived of all
sympathy, all understanding. They are thoughtless, these happy people who
sleep.36
In this extraordinary passage, Adolphe Blanc speaks what we could call
the truth of the novel: the happiness of the straight world is a form of
injustice. Heterosexual happiness is narrated as a social wrong, as based on
the unthinking exclusion of those whose difference is already narrated as
deprivation. The unhappiness of the deviant performs a claim for justice.
At one point, Stephen and Mary are rejected by a woman who had
befriended them. She rejects them to protect her own reputation and the reputation of her
daughter. She sends them a letter announcing that she has been forced “to break
off our friendship” and asks them not to come to her house for Christmas as had
been planned.37 In other words, to protect her family’s happiness she has to reject proximity
to those who might “stain” her reputation, those who are already attributed as
unhappiness causes, as being or embodying the unhappiness they are assumed to
cause. They are no longer welcome at the family table; they cannot share the
celebration.
We can see from this example how happiness can
be fearful and defensive. You might refuse proximity to somebody out of fear
that they will take your happiness away. To be rejected in order to preserve
the happiness of others can mean that you experience the feelings that are
attributed to you: “Then it seemed to
Stephen that all the pain that had so far been thrust upon her by existence,
was as nothing to the unendurable pain which she must now bear to hear that
sobbing, to see Mary thus wounded, and utterly crushed, thus shamed and humbled
for the sake of their love, thus bereft of all dignity and protection.”38 Stephen cannot bear the unhappiness that she witnesses on the face of the
beloved. It is because the world is unhappy with queer love that queers become
unhappy; because queer love is an unhappiness-cause for the others whom they
love, who share their place of residence. It is not then that queers feel sad
or wretched right from the beginning. Queer unhappiness does not provide us
with a beginning. Certain subjects might appear as sad or wretched, or might
even become sad or wretched because they are perceived as lacking what causes
happiness.
It does seem like we hurtle towards our miserable ending, when Stephen
gives Mary up, by appearing to give Mary to Martin. The association between
queer fates and fatality seems partly the point. For some readers this ending
is evidence that the novel does not place its own hopes for happiness within
lesbianism. Jay Prosser, for instance, argues “that Stephen gives up Mary to
Martin Hallam in spite of Mary’s devotion to her indicates that the invert
functions not as a figure for lesbianism—a lure or a construct—but precisely as
its refusal. Through her passing over Mary (both passing over her and passing
her over to Martin), Stephen affirms her identification with the heterosexual
man.”39 I want to read what is being affirmed by Stephen’s gesture quite differently.
Does Stephen give Mary to Martin as Prosser suggests? I want to suggest that an
alternative gift economy is at stake. Take the following passage:
Never before had she seen so clearly all that was lacking to Mary
Llewellyn, all that would pass from her faltering grasp, perhaps never to
return, with the passing of Martin—children, a home that the world will
respect, ties of affection that the world would hold sacred, the blessèd
security and the peace of being released from the world’s persecution. And
suddenly Martin appeared to Stephen as a creature endowed with incalculable
bounty, having in his hands all those priceless gifts which she, love’s
mendicant could never offer. Only one
gift she could offer to love, to Mary, and that was the gift of Martin.
40
Stephen does not give Mary to Martin. She gives Martin to Mary.
She gives Martin to Mary as a way of giving Mary access to a happiness that she
cannot give. This gift signals not a failure to love, but a form of love: it is
because the world is unhappy with their love that Stephen cannot be the cause
of Mary’s happiness.
We can see the problems of the idea that love
is to cause or to want to cause happiness for a queer politics given a world in
which queerness is read as wretched. In other words, a queer lover might not be
able to cause happiness for her beloved if her beloved cannot bear being
rejected by the straight world. We could of course point to a counter history
of queers who have caused other queers to be happy through their love, even if
the world has not been happy with such love. But I do wonder whether a queer
definition of love might want to separate love from happiness, given how
happiness tends to come with rather straight conditions. I thus offer Simone
Weil’s definition of love as a queer definition: “Love on the part of someone who is happy is the wish to share the
suffering of the beloved who is unhappy. Love on the part of someone who is
unhappy is to be filled with joy by the mere knowledge that his beloved is
happy without sharing in this happiness or even wishing to do so.”41 Queer love might involve happiness only by insisting that such happiness is not what is shared.
Stephen might not insist on sharing Mary’s happiness, but it is her
desire for Mary’s happiness that leads to the awkward gift of Martin. We do not
know, in the novel, whether Mary receives this gift: we are not given an ending
for Mary, as Clare Hemmings observes.42 Perhaps the point is that Mary’s happiness cannot be told, as Mary’s “real
story has yet to be told” as Esther Newton describes.43 If anything, for Mary, Stephen’s gesture is lived as a death: “A mist closing
down, a thick black mist. Someone pushing the girl away, without speaking.
Mary’s queer voice coming out of the gloom, muffled by the folds of the black
mist, only a word here and there getting through: ‘All my life I’ve given…you’ve killed…I loved you…Cruel, oh cruel!
You’re unspeakably cruel…’ Then the sound of the rough and pitiful sobbing.”44 Martin does arrive at this moment, but only because Stephen has put him there.
Perhaps the injustice of the ending is the presumption that Mary’s
happiness depends on being given up. Or does the ending give up on happiness by
giving Mary up? This alternative ending does not convert unhappiness into
happiness, but does something else with unhappiness. For in the moment Stephen
gives up on happiness, she feels a bond of unhappiness with those who share the
signs of inversion:
Rockets of pain, burning rockets of pain—their pain, her pain, all welded together into one consuming agony.
Rockets of pain that shot up and burst, dropping scorching tears of fire on the
spirit—her pain, their pain…all the
misery at Alec’s. And the press and the clamour of those countless others—they
fought, they trampled, they were getting her under. In their madness to become articulate through her, they were
tearing her to pieces, getting her under. They were everywhere now, cutting off
her retreat: neither bolts nor bars would avail to save her. The walls fell
down and crumbed before them; at the cry of their suffering the walls fell and crumbled: “We are
coming, Stephen—we are still coming on, and our name is legion—you dare not
disown us!” She raised her arms, trying to ward them off, but they closed in
and in: “You dare not disown us!” They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful—it ached with its fearful and
sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would
clamour in vain for their right to salvation.45
What is striking for me is the switch between “her pain, their pain” and
“their pain, her pain”; the passage weaves the stories of pain together. She
comes to embody this pain, to speak it, to articulate it. At this moment, the
moment when she seems most on her own, she is also most connected to others.
And at this very moment, this moment of madness, “the walls fell down.” This is
an image of revolution: the walls that contain the misery are brought down: an
un-housing that is not only a call for arms, but a disturbance in the very
grounds for happiness, insofar as the happy folk, those who sleep, those who do
not have to think, depend on misery being kept under ground. Indeed, the moment
of revolution is a new form of reproduction, a reproduction of another kind of
life form, a queer life form, perhaps. Queer unhappiness offers a rather
deviant form of fertility.
In The
Well of Loneliness, the solution to a world that is unhappy with queer love
is to give up the possibility of queer happiness and revolt against the world. It does not follow that queers must become unhappy
even if we are attributed as the origin of familial and social unhappiness. We
know after all that queer history is a history of loves that are not given up.
We have behind us many stories of queers who are neither made unhappy by
causing unhappiness, nor who try and become happy by minimizing the signs of
their queerness. Take for example Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle, first published in 1973, which tells the story of
Molly Bolt. One of the first lesbian books I read, it is for me a very happy
object. I love it. I loved Molly, for her fierceness, her defiance, her
willingness to get into trouble.
Molly follows her desires, wherever they take her. The story of the book
is a story of her conquests, and there are many. She says in response to a
question from a lover about how many women she has slept with: “Hundreds. I’m
irresistible.”46 She still has to live with consequences of her deviation. When she is called into the dean's office at University of Florida after her lesbian behavior has been reported, Molly is asked by the dean about
her problem with girls, and replies:
“Dean Marne, I don’t have any problems relating to girls and I’m in love
with my roommate. She makes me happy.” Her scraggly red eyebrows with the brown
pencil glaring through shot up. “Is this relationship with Faye Raider of an, uh—intimate
nature?” “We fuck, if that’s what you’re after.” I think her womb collapsed on
that one. Sputtering, she pressed forward. “Don’t you find that somewhat of an
aberration? Doesn’t this disturb you, my dear?”47
Rather than being disturbed by being found disturbing, Molly performs
the ultimate act of defiance, by claiming her happiness as abnormal. To be
happily queer is to explore the unhappiness of what gets counted as normal. It
is as if queers, by doing what they want, expose the unhappiness of having to
sacrifice personal desires, in the perversity of their twists and turns, for
the happiness of others.48
Even the ending of the book is not happy—Molly is the only one from film
school who is not offered a break: “No, I wasn’t surprised, but it still
brought me down. I kept hoping against hope that I’d be the bright exception,
the talented token that smashed sex and class barriers. Hurrah for her. After
all, I was the best in my class, didn’t that count for something?”49 And yet, we don’t end there, with the loss of hope. For Molly articulates a
wish that at the very least, she can
be the “hottest fifty-year-old this side of the Mississippi.”50 To be happily queer is to hope that queerness is what will endure life’s
struggle.
This is not to say we always have to struggle to be queer. We
can also turn to another more recent novel narrated by a happily queer subject, Babyji, published by Abha Dawesar in
2005. Set in India, this novel is written from the point of view of Anamika
Sharma, a fun, smart, spirited and sexy teenager, who seduces three women: an
older divorcee she names India, a servant girl called Rani, and her school
friend Sheela. As a character, Anamika is very appealing. Everyone desires her,
wants something from her, such that the reader is encouraged to desire her too,
as well as to identify with her desire.
We do not notice happiness used as a requirement that Anamika give up
her desires. Instead, the first use of happiness as a speech act is of a rather
more queer nature: “‘I want to make you
happy,’ I said as I was leaving. ‘You do make me happy,’ India said. ‘No, I
don’t mean that way. I mean in bed.’51 Anamika separates her own desire to make her lover happy for “that way.” She
wants to make India happy “in bed”, to be the cause of her pleasure. Not
wanting to cause happiness “that way” is what releases Anamika from a certain
kind of drama: it is in the bed and not on the table where she finds her place.
She refuses to give happiness the power to secure a specific image of what
would count as a good life, or of what she can give.
This book is certainly about the perverse potential of pleasure. This is
not to say that Anamika does not have to rebel or does not get into trouble.
Almost all of this trouble is located in her relationship to her father.
Unsurprisingly, the conflict between father and queer daughter turns to the
question of happiness. Anamika says to her father: “You like tea, I like
coffee. I want to be a physicist, and Vidur wants to join the army. I don’t
want to get married, and mom did. How can the same formula make us all happy.”52 To which her father replies, “What do you mean you don’t want to get married.”
Anamika recognizes the idiosyncratic nature of happy object
choices: different people are made happy by different things, we have a
diversity of likes and dislikes. She names marriage as one happy object choice
that exists alongside others. The inclusion of marriage as something that you
might or might not like is picked up by the father, turning queer desire into a
question that interrupts the flow of the conversation.
The exchange shows us how object choices are not equivalent, how some
choices such as marrying or not marrying are not simply presentable as
idiosyncratic likes, as they take us beyond the horizon of intimacy, in which
those likes can gather as a shared form. Although the novel might seem to articulate a queer liberalism, whereby
the queer subject is free to be happy in their own way, it evokes the limits of
that liberalism, by showing how the conflation of marriage with the good life
is maintained in response to queer deviation. Although we can live without the
promise of happiness, and can do so “happily,” we live with the consequences of
being an unhappiness-cause for others, which is why the process of coming out
is an ongoing site of possibility and struggle.
Queer politics might radicalize freedom as the freedom to be unhappy.
The freedom to be unhappy would be the freedom to live a life that deviates from
the paths of happiness, wherever that deviation takes us. It would mean the
freedom to cause unhappiness by acts of deviation. Queer enjoyment can thus be
expressed as an embodiment of the freedom to be unhappy.
In calling for the freedom to be unhappy, I am thus not saying queers
must be unhappy in the sense of feeling sad or wretched, or that queer politics
demands our unhappiness. I am not saying that unhappiness becomes necessary. I
would say that unhappiness is always possible, which makes the necessity of
happiness an exclusion not just of unhappiness but of possibility. The history
of happiness is not simply about the description of unhappiness as the failure
to be happy in the right way; it is also about the exclusion of the hap from
happiness, as the exclusion of possibility and chance. I now think of queer
movements as hap movements rather than happiness movements. It is not about the
unhappy ones becoming the happy ones. Revolutionary forms of political
consciousness involve heightening our awareness of just how much there is to be unhappy about. Yet this does not mean
unhappiness becomes our political cause. In refusing to be constrained by
happiness, we can open up other ways of being, of being perhaps.
The word “perhaps” shares its “hap” with
happiness. We can get from the “perhaps” to the wretch if we deviate at a
certain point. One definition of the wretch is a “poor and hapless being.” I
would say those who enter the history of happiness as wretches might be hapful
rather than hapless. To deviate from the paths of happiness is to refuse to
inherit the elimination of the hap. Affect aliens, those who are alienated by
happiness, can thus be creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only
do we embrace possibilities that we are asked to give up, but we can create
life worlds around these wants. Whilst we might insist on the freedom to be
unhappy, we would not leave happiness behind us. Maybe it will be up to queers to put the hap back
into happiness.
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Postcoloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Routledge, 2004); Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others (Duke University Press. 2006); and The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working on a collection of essays on diversity and racism and has recently begun research for a new book provisionally entitled Willful Subjects: The Psychic Life of Social Dissent.
Notes
1 This paper is drawn
from my forthcoming book The Promise of
Happiness (and in particular from the chapter “Unhappy Queers” which
includes a much wider archive of queer materials than is represented here).
This book is due to be published by
Duke University Press in 2010. Thanks to Duke for permission to include this
paper in World Picture.
2 Vin Packer, Spring
Fire (San Francisco. Cleis Press,
2004), vi.
3 Ibid., vii.
4 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 127.
5 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2003), Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Sally Munt, Queer
Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
6 This is not to reduce happiness to good
feeling. The association between happiness with good feeling is a modern one,
as Darrin McMahon shows us in his monumental history of happiness [Darrin M
McMahon, Happiness: A History (New
York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005)]. We have inherited this association such
that it is hard to think about happiness without thinking about feeling.
Happiness has also been associated with virtue and the value of flourishing:
with the good life. My interest is in how happiness involves an affective as
well as moral economy: I will thus explore the relationship between feeling
good and other kinds of goods, or how feelings participate in making some things and not others good.
7 Lisa Walker, Looking
Like What You Are: Sexual Style, Race and Lesbian Identity (New York: New
York University Press, 2001), 127.
8 Catherine R. Stimpson, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces (New York:
Methuen, 1988), 101.
9 Sara Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
10 John Locke, An
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Penguin Books, 1997), 216.
11 Ibid., 215.
12 Ibid., 247.
13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufman and J. Hollingdale (New
York: Vintage Books, 1968), 294-295.
14 Ibid., 354.
15 See Sara Ahmed, Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000).
16 Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, Second Edition (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2003), 59.
17 Ibid., 61.
18 Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses,” New Formations, 63 (2008): 33.
19 In Queer Phenomenology I described the
table as a kinship object and asked how a queer politics might offer a
different angle on tables. The argument is extended here (somewhat obliquely)
by considering the tables of happiness.
20 Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays
and Speeches (Trumansburg: The Crossing Press, 1984); bell hooks, Feminist Theory: from
Margin to Centre (London: Pluto Press, 2000). I develop my argument
about the figure of the angry black woman in the chapters “Feminist Killjoys”
and “Melancholic Migrants” in The Promise
of Happiness (forthcoming).
21 hooks, 56.
22 Cited in Bill Lucas, Bill (Happy Families: How To Make One, How to Keep
One. Harlow: Educational
Publishers, 2006), 26. This principle that to love makes the other’s happiness
essential to your own is widely articulated. But does this principle always hold true? I would say there is a desire
for this principle to be true, but that this desire does not make the principle
true, as a psychoanalytic approach might suggest. If love is to desire the
happiness of another, then the happiness of the subject who loves might depend
upon the happiness of the other who is loved. As such, love can also be
experienced as the possibility that the beloved can take your happiness away
from you. This anxious happiness, you might say, forms the basis of an
ambivalent sociality: in which we love those we love, but we might also hate
those we love for making us love them, which is what makes us vulnerable to
being affected by what happens to them: in other words, love extends our
vulnerability beyond our own skin. Perhaps fellow-feeling is a form of social
hope: we want to want happiness for those we love; we want our happy objects to
amount to the same thing. Even if we feel guilty for wishing unhappiness upon
our enemies, it is a less guilty wish than wishing unhappiness upon our
friends. In other words, our presumed
indifference toward the happiness of strangers might help us to sustain the
fantasy that we always want the happiness of those we love, or that our love
wants their happiness.
23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 359.
24 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy,
trans. Peter Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2008), 12.
25 You might be asked to
disregard your views on x in order to make someone happy. I have found this
especially true in the case of weddings. You are asked or even instructed to
join the happy event of the wedding because it would make someone happy for you
to share in their happy occasion even if they know that you are not happy with
the very idea of marriage that is celebrated in weddings. You are often judged
as selfish when you refuse the demand to participate in the happiness of
others, especially in cases when such happiness is sanctioned by law, habit or
custom.
26 Rousseau, 434.
27 Nancy Garden, Annie
on My Mind (New York: Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, 1982), 191.
28 In The Promise of Happiness I offer a
detailed reading of this film, suggesting that the happiness of the ending can
be related to queer struggles for a bearable life, and not simply or only to
aspirations for the good life. So while I am suggesting here that promotions of
happiness can involve an affective
form of homonormativity [see Lisa Duggan, The
Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on
Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Judith Halberstam, In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies,
Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005)], I would not
and do not equate happiness with normativity. As I will suggest in due course,
being happily queer can be to be happy with and about one’s deviation. It is
worth noting however that in books such as How
to be a Happy Homosexual the promotion of happy homosexuality does involve
a commitment to “de-queer” gay life. The book includes criticisms of practices
such as cottaging, as “for the isolated and insecure gay man it fosters the
idea that contact with gay people is of necessity dirty, undignified,
nerve-wracking and dangerous. It can do nothing for the self-image of those gay
men, who already have a bad opinion of their sexuality” (Terry Sanderson, How to be a Happy
Homosexual: A Guide for Gay Men (London: The Other Way Press, 1991) 64). Cruising is also
criticized as it can “increase the sense of isolation in those who are already
unhappy with their sexuality” (Sanderson, 67). Sanderson criticizes the
hedonism of queer culture, suggesting that homosexual men need to develop an
ethics premised on making other people happy (145). Although he does not
describe such ethics in terms of conservative family values (or in terms of
mimicking straight relationships or family forms), it is clearly linked to the
promoting of a sociability premised on fellow feeling or what he calls “finer
feelings,” which is contrasted to the superficiality and hedonism of queer
cultures (145). I am indebted here to Vincent Quinn for an excellent paper which
reflected on How to be a Happy Homosexual as a sexual conduct manual.
29 See http://www.popmatters.com/film/reviews/l/lost-and-delirious.shtml.
Last accessed July 9, 2009.
30 See Sarah Schulman, Stage Struck: Theatre, Aids and the
Marketing of Gay America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 102.
31 The perception of queers as inevitably unhappy can have extremely violent
and devastating consequences. See for example Michael Schroeder and Ariel
Shidlo’s analysis of how clinicians have used this argument—that gay people
will inevitably be unhappy—to justify sexual conversion therapy (Michael
Schroeder and Ariel Shidlo, “Ethical Issues in Sexual Orientation Conversion
Therapies: An Empirical Study of Consumers” in Ariel Shidlo, Michael Schroeder, Jack Drescher (eds), Sexual Conversion Therapy: Ethical,
Clinical, and Research Perspectives (Philadelphia: Haworth Press, 2002), 134-135). By implication, gay patients
are asked to give up desire for happiness. Many of these homophobic discourses
in psychiatry aimed to debunk what they call “the myth of the happy homosexual”
in order to argue for “cure” rather than “adjustment” (see Peter Conrad and
Joseph W. Schneider, Deviance and Medicalization:
From Badness to Sickness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980),
191). They are deeply invested in the necessity and inevitably of queer
unhappiness. So although we might want to question the promotion of happy
homosexuals discussed in note 28, we might also want to remember that disbelief
in the very possibility of queer happiness is crucial to the violence of
homophobia.
32 Cited by Sanderson, 141-2.
33 These definitions are all taken from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). All subsequent definitions and etymological references are drawn
from the OED.
34 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago Press, 1982), 411. Derived
from sexology, inversion was used as a way of interpreting lesbian sexuality
(if she desires women, she must be a man). Given this, the invert both stands
for and stands in for the figure of the lesbian, a way of presenting her that
also erases her, which is not to say that we should assume the invert can only
signify in this way. See Ahmed 2006 for a discussion of the relation between
the figure of the lesbian and the invert in The
Well of Loneliness, as well as Prosser (Second Skins: Body
Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) who reads the invert as the
transsexual. See also Doan and Prosser’s edited collection on The Well of Loneliness (2001), which
includes articles on the relations between inversion, transsexuality and
homosexuality.
35 The Well of Loneliness, 303.
36 Ibid., 394-5.
37 Ibid., 374.
38 Ibid., 375.
39 Prosser (1998: 166).
40 The Well of Loneliness, 438-9 (emphasis added).
41 Simone Weil, Gravity
and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge,
2002), 63.
42 Clare Hemmings, “‘All my life I have been waiting for something’: Theorising Femme Narrative
in The Well of Loneliness,” in Laura
Doan and Jay Prosser (eds.), Palatable
Poison: Critical Perspectives on The Well of Loneliness (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2001), 194.
43 Esther Newton, Margaret Mead Made Me Gay: Personal Essays,
Public Ideas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 188. Both
Hemmings and Newton are addressing how The
Well’s focus on the “the mannish lesbian” means that the position of the
femme or feminine lesbian is left vacant. My reading concurs with theirs and
suggests that this vacation could be re-read in terms of happiness: the femme’s
desire is not presented beyond the desire for happiness, which is assumed to
lead her back into the straight world. Such readings are in sympathy with the
novel, recognizing the force of its own revelation of the injustice of the
straight world, even if they suggest that femme desire outside the happiness
economy needs to be spoken.
44 The Well of Loneliness, 445.
45 Ibid., 447.
46 Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit
Jungle, (New York, Bantam Books, 1973), 200.
47 Ibid., 127.
48 The social investment in unhappy queer lives can thus exist alongside
envy for queer enjoyment: queer enjoyment bypasses the duty to reproduce social
form (“the happiness duty” is a “reproductive duty”), and is thus given without
being earned. By living outside the logics of duty and sacrifice, queer
pleasures embody what is threatening about freedom.
49 Rubyfruit
Jungle, 245.
50 Ibid., 246.
51 Abha Dawesar, Babyji (New York: Anchor Books, 2005), 31.
52 Ibid., 177.