Thank you so much for bringing it up. Very very sensitive of you. It sounded a lot like my and my fellow brown women's lived realities. This plague of happiness. This enormous excruciating responsibility of ensuring happiness slyly shifted on our shoulder by the heteronormative hegemony. It's an oppression we face everyday in our lives. Very subtly injected into our consciousness so much so that the abuse becomes a part of us. This sham of happiness. I can't thank you enough. Stay blessed.
Much more than just heteronormative hegemony, usually the alternatives to this justify themselves even more based on happiness than some external good. Whether we personally support the ideal or not, it cannot be denied that something like trans activism is very much also based on this compulsion towards happiness and affirmation, a rejection of negativity and otherness. In fact those movements are defined solely by reducing the restrictions on the subject that make them “unhappy” such that we are meant to find some liberating happiness underneath traditional structures. That’s why enforced happiness existed in the soviet regime in an almost ironic sense because it was dialectically assumed that any state opposite of Market-capitalism as the sole cause of our unhappiness, must make us happy, and thereby there was cultural and state coercion to reflect this. I’m always skeptical when someone says “X existing hierarchy causes X problem” and then the solution or opposite that they offer, just reconstruct the same problem or oppression but under the illusion that they’re now somehow free.
Thanks so much for making this book accesible. Your podcast brings about happiness from its content and from an aesthetic point of view. Your work blends beauty and peace within voice and clarity. It is a light in the journey to distill ideologies, especially for us people who grew up oblivious to philosophy and in countries not blessed with wise, charismatic nor kind leaders. It delivers so much for us who are trapped by the promise of happiness. Best regards. Mauricio
It’s interesting how she starts the text critiquing that kind of pop psychology of “just get married, have 2.3 kids” etc. And how this form of happiness which is a kind of contextual social relation then becomes conflated with “the good”. But it seems like even her attempt to escape this just restructures the same problem. As much as we grew up in an context where marriage was let’s say “good” and gave you “happiness” today we see the opposite, with a kind of no need for marriage or social relationship attitude, as well as a shrugging off of traditional power centres and formulations of happiness just to replace them with equally arbitrary foundations of happiness, that we can justify by dominant social modes available to us, such as saying this is a queer notion of happiness, or how BIPOC understand happiness. As in one form of arbitrary social legitimation is simply removed for another, and the substance of the power-happiness-good relation is being critiqued more than its form at that point. Interesting text however, and will be watching part 2 as well. Love your channel and videos as always
I'm glad I discovered Sara Ahmed. Such a thought provoking writer.Thanks for the summary.
Thank you! An excellent introduction to this book. Goes to my thesis reading list.
Thank you so much for bringing it up. Very very sensitive of you. It sounded a lot like my and my fellow brown women's lived realities. This plague of happiness. This enormous excruciating responsibility of ensuring happiness slyly shifted on our shoulder by the heteronormative hegemony. It's an oppression we face everyday in our lives. Very subtly injected into our consciousness so much so that the abuse becomes a part of us. This sham of happiness.
I can't thank you enough. Stay blessed.
Much more than just heteronormative hegemony, usually the alternatives to this justify themselves even more based on happiness than some external good. Whether we personally support the ideal or not, it cannot be denied that something like trans activism is very much also based on this compulsion towards happiness and affirmation, a rejection of negativity and otherness. In fact those movements are defined solely by reducing the restrictions on the subject that make them “unhappy” such that we are meant to find some liberating happiness underneath traditional structures. That’s why enforced happiness existed in the soviet regime in an almost ironic sense because it was dialectically assumed that any state opposite of Market-capitalism as the sole cause of our unhappiness, must make us happy, and thereby there was cultural and state coercion to reflect this. I’m always skeptical when someone says “X existing hierarchy causes X problem” and then the solution or opposite that they offer, just reconstruct the same problem or oppression but under the illusion that they’re now somehow free.
@@fahim-ev8qq thought provoking
You make me happy. Thank you for your generosity! Loving these lectures
Thanks so much for making this book accesible. Your podcast brings about happiness from its content and from an aesthetic point of view. Your work blends beauty and peace within voice and clarity. It is a light in the journey to distill ideologies, especially for us people who grew up oblivious to philosophy and in countries not blessed with wise, charismatic nor kind leaders. It delivers so much for us who are trapped by the promise of happiness. Best regards. Mauricio
Thank you 🔥
You are amazing 🔥
What do you mean with BIPOC people usually pick up pieces of families when shattered? Where is this mentioned in Ahmed's book?
It’s interesting how she starts the text critiquing that kind of pop psychology of “just get married, have 2.3 kids” etc. And how this form of happiness which is a kind of contextual social relation then becomes conflated with “the good”. But it seems like even her attempt to escape this just restructures the same problem. As much as we grew up in an context where marriage was let’s say “good” and gave you “happiness” today we see the opposite, with a kind of no need for marriage or social relationship attitude, as well as a shrugging off of traditional power centres and formulations of happiness just to replace them with equally arbitrary foundations of happiness, that we can justify by dominant social modes available to us, such as saying this is a queer notion of happiness, or how BIPOC understand happiness. As in one form of arbitrary social legitimation is simply removed for another, and the substance of the power-happiness-good relation is being critiqued more than its form at that point. Interesting text however, and will be watching part 2 as well. Love your channel and videos as always
I think that Ashley Frawley's work on happiness appeals to me more than this. Sara Ahmed's work makes me feel unhappy lol
Sorry, I accidentally clicked on that dumb dislike button when I wanted to read the video description! This is a fantastic discussion.
Happiness as a translation for eudaimonia is a joke.