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Document Type

Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

In her 2010 work, The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed contends that contemporary society is in the midst of a "happiness turn" (3) that is characterized by a resurgence of interest in the "economics and science of happiness" (3) in popular media, as well as the rapid growth of the so-called "happiness industry" (3) and the establishment of several university departments of Happiness Studies. Recognizing that the concept of happiness has historically been used to justify the oppression of women and minorities, she argues that our contemporary turn to happiness represents a manifestation of a larger socio-political strategy, one in which happiness is deployed as an objective measure of both prosperity and progress and thus functions as an ideological schema through which classes of subjects are marked and differentiated. As she explains, "The science of happiness makes correlations between happiness levels and social indicators, creating what are called ‘happiness indicators.’ Happiness indicators tell us which kinds of people have more happiness; they function not only as measures of happiness, but also as predictors of happiness" (6). To Ahmed, then, our contemporary fixation on happiness is problematic, especially to the degree to which happiness becomes a duty or an imperative: a means of coercing individuals to adopt subject positions that, as she writes, invariably reflect "ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way’" (13). Constructed in this manner, as a "more genuine way of measuring progress" (Ahmed 3), happiness is symptomatic of what Ahmed describes as a very unhappy social agenda, one that presents the economic, gendered, and racialized norms of the status quo as natural, inevitable, and therefore, good.

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