Dec42008
Do Worry, Be Unhappy: On Sara Ahmed’s Lecture, “Unhappy Queer”
Posted by Peter Fritch under Uncategorized
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When I was a kid and Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” came on the radio on my way to school, I would always, without exception, cringe. Maybe I’m just a killjoy at heart, but I always reasoned that if I “ain’t got no place to lay my head,” I should probably worry. It wasn’t the “feel-good” boom-boppin’ a cappella that really, as my grandpa says, “got my goat”; it was the assumptions built into his reasoning, namely, that “when you worry, your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down.”
As if by saying, “Be happy,” McFerrin were able to erase all causes of unhappiness from the world, this ’90s hit says much more than meets the ear. Happiness appears as something to be adjudicated by others. McFerrin tells the listener to be “like good little children” and not to worry, assigning happiness like a project, with as many conditions as a preschool show-and-tell. Gold stars for extra smiles!
A like-minded killjoy, Sara Ahmed, Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University, took up this issue in her lecture, “Unhappy Queer.” In the cozy English Lounge in Goldwin Smith Hall, Ahmed, possibly one of the hippest professors on Earth I’ve ever seen, did not mention Bobby McFerrin at all when describing her forthcoming book, The Promise of Happiness. Indeed, the obligatory name-dropping to be expected in an Cultural Studies lecture was surprisingly absent. Thankfully, she talked about family dinners, The L Word, and classic serial novels of lesbian debauchery instead.
She started her talk (aided by a purple Powerpoint presentation) with an excerpt from a conversation between the author of a lesbian serial novel and her publisher, who insisted that it couldn’t have a happy ending because it would imply to the reader that “activities” like these are acceptable.
Pimpin’ the royal “we,” Ahmed commented:
“We are not obliged to accept the unhappy ending” since it is unhappiness itself that “generates books in queer literature… What does [unhappiness] allow us to do? What might it mean to affirm unhappiness or, at least, not to ignore it?… Happiness has been historically used to justify oppression, to re-describe social norms as social goods, as the place-holder of human desire… we have to temporarily suspend our belief that happiness is what we truly wish for, or that it is even good.”
Down with happiness! Up yours, McFerrin!
Ahmed then dove into the etymology of happiness and its relation to contingency. Way, way back in the day, the “hap” of “happiness” was linked to words such as “happenstance” or “perhaps,” focusing our attention on the instantaneous nature of bliss. “Happiness” was not a goal to be achieved but rather something that hit you like an eighteen-wheeler and then sped away, leaving your roadkill’d corpse in its wake.
Somewhere along the line, though, its meaning shifted. Whereas it originally implied an orientation to objects the body just happened to come in contact with, happiness was then morphed into an orientation towards what is deemed “good,” i.e. societal norms. To further this point with a splash of humor, Ahmed cited Rousseau: “The good woman finds her happiness in the hope of just making her parents happy.” Here, she said, happiness is given as a shared orientation towards the common good, meaning tradition; Happiness became based on terms, on conditions that punished deviation and with that, banished anything “queer” to the margins.
As a proud gay English major, I was SO into this talk. I nearly dropped a load with excitement when she started to talk about happiness in the context of coming out. Parents say ALL THE TIME, “I’m just worried that you’ll be unhappy,” but what they really mean (Ahmed agrees with me on this one) is: Having a queer life is having an unhappy life because it is a life without marriage and (at least in many places, most recently Arkansas) without children. What parents mean, then, is, “My indifference to your ‘preference’ is imagined.” And then they fall prey to the McFerrin reasoning: “You are making me unhappy because your life is going to be wretched.”
Ahmed explained in this context that parents take “the unhappiness of the queer child as its point,” essentially assigning unhappiness as a natural entry point into queer life (a picket fence of rainbows and tears, if you will). But (on second thought, this needs to be in all caps), BUT, queer history has been marked by unhappiness, more specifically, by activists willing to cause unhappiness by disturbing the status quo meant to guarantee happiness. By owning it, they rethink it.
Ahmed ended with something I would almost want to say is optimism, arguing that “we” royal queers need to “put the hap” back into happiness, to translate “freedom” into the “freedom to be unhappy,” to live a life that deviates from the powers of straight happiness, and if necessary, to cause unhappiness. ”To turn happiness into expectation,” Ahmed argued, “is to annul possibility.” With that, “in unhappiness there exists the politics of possibility, of what can be undone… To make hap is to make a world.”
During a long Q & A session with probably every gay grad student on campus (Where are you guys hiding?) and a ton of bad-ass chicks as well, Ahmed flirted with the audience about being the archetypal feminist killjoy at family dinners and the secret pleasure she gets in correcting her father for his, for lack of a less academic word, problematic statements.
What I concluded from this talk is that Queer Studies is where it’s at. Unpretentious (at times), approachable (usually), and rife with the potential to bring about actual change (a worry I sometimes have when I think about theory), Ahmed’s talk blew me away and made me feel, as I walked down the steps of Goldwin Smith and into the uninviting, early Ithaca winter, hopeful and, well, happy.
