Happiness: A Cultural Study

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This research explores how happiness works as a promise that directs us towards certain objects, as if they provide the necessary ingredients for a good life. The very promise of happiness - if you do this, then happiness will follow - is what makes certain things seem 'promising'. The research will explore how happiness works as a narrative and emotion, by considering how happiness becomes 'the what' that we aim for, which directs story and action. What does it mean to say: 'I just want you to be happy?' What is 'just happiness'? And how is happiness 'just'?Responding to the recent 'happiness turn' within economics, psychology and political science, this research will offer a cultural approach to happiness by asking not 'what is happiness?', or 'how can we measure happiness', but 'what does happiness do?' and 'how do ideas about happiness shape what coheres as a world?' The research explores the ways in which the ' new science of happiness' works to produce particular images of what counts as a good life, based on taking certain ways of living as social ideals. Rather than assuming happiness simply describes what is good, the research will consider how happiness is involved in the 'making of goods'. For example, I will explore how happiness is presumed to reside within certain points within the life course (such as marriage and reproduction), which is what makes the 'points' affective as social ideals. Through the research, I will explore how heterosexuality and the family come to embody happiness, as if inhabiting these forms will enable you to have access to a good life. The research also considers how happiness is narrated as following from specific political ideals, such as multiculturalism, which in turn promise to overcome forms of unhappiness. It considers how certain lives are presumed to be unhappy, as lacking the 'things' that make people happy, such as queer lives. By analysing the 'conversion points' between bad and good feeling within a range of narratives, I will pose the questions: who is seen to bring happiness to whom? How do bad feelings get converted into good ones? Who promises to overcome unhappiness and what does it mean for some to be seen as the bearers of this promise? In posing these questions, the research will investigate how feminist, queer and anti-racist politics work by exposing the the 'unhappy effects' of the promise of happiness.In order to investigate what happiness does, this research will involve close readings of the recent 'science of happiness' literature, and related commentaries in the press. The research will place this 'happiness archive' alongside a black, queer and feminist archive, which explores lives that exist outside the contours of what has been described as the good life. These archives could be described at least in part as unhappy, insofar as they involve texts that offer social critiques of existing ways of living and which embody a form of struggle against particular claims about happiness. By exploring the affective power of certain figures - the kill joy feminist, the angry black woman, the unhappy queer - the research will examine how this archive challenges the alignment between happiness and the good. For example, the feminist archive involves many narratives about the unhappiness that is concealed by the image of the 'happy housewife'. Focusing on unhappy and happy endings within feminist, queer and black cultural practices, I will explore the critiques of happiness implicit in embracing an unhappy political identity. My consideration of the cultural politics of happiness will focus on histories that hurt and the relation between hurt and hope for a better future. While I focus on the unhappy effects of some narratives of happiness, I also focus on the happy effects of some narratives of unhappiness, and how they open up alternative models of what might count as a good life.