[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_13

Sara Ahmed, The feminist Killjoy handbook, 2023

There is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy. True, if we know what it means to be satisfied. But what is happiness? Happiness is presented as an inalienable right without a univocal definition of this word. What is presented to us as a right is more of a narrative, a myth, an idea.

The right to happiness appears for the first time in the American Declaration of Independence. Still, it is not a modern invention: Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, spoke of the importance of pleasure and, before him, a very long Epicurean tradition philosophized around the link between well-being and desire. Being happy is a need as old as the world. Transforming happiness into a right means constitutionally guaranteeing people the satisfaction of a need and being able to control how this need is satisfied and how the right is exercised. Even more so if no one knows exactly what happiness is. When the pursuit of happiness as a right appeared in the Constitution, no one had in mind the goal of a smiling society that cultivates contemplation but a society that was willing to compete (economically) to satisfy its (economic) desires.

Personal happiness is a condition of well-being that arises from a continuous dialogue with oneself; it is the fruit of research, of painful sincerity, of comparisons; it is not an end that is achieved once and for all, but an awareness that is renewed and which must be re-appropriated daily by remaining in contact with oneself. And above all, it cannot be a constitutional, i.e., standardized, happiness. However, constitutional happiness could have an economic psychology that influences our desires since it homogenizes the horizon of people’s gazes and builds a shared collective imagination. Think of all those advertisements for biscuits and snacks with the happy nuclear family in the background or the bombardment of films that present the heterosexual love story as the highest goal of life for women: these are the horizons of happiness that have been offered to Western people for a century by all types of media available. If society does not know its happiness, the economy can show what it should desire or where it is best to look.

The most striking example is the advertising campaign of the 1950s, which glamorized the housewife as a desirable female role and which instead served to push the sale of household appliances.

When I was twenty, I had absurd anxiety: I felt I had very little time to find my happiness. I heard the chatter around me of mothers with happy and settled girls. "They're your age!" they told me. I also tried to "settle down" like the unknown girls I heard so much about, hoping to be happy like them, too. But I couldn't. Finding any job with a permanent contract, living close to home, and having a partner to share the rent with did not seem like the formula for happiness to me but the secret ingredients for suicide. I was told that I was strange, that I wasn't normal, that I only wanted to behave like that to give my family some grief. I was told that I was a killjoy because I wasn't moving towards the horizon of shared happiness because I wasn’t making the same choices of others nor the choices that others expected from me.

Reading Sarah Ahmed was, therefore, an absolution: “It would be hard to find a clear example of the gendered nature of the moral economy of happiness. The good woman loves virtue as the road to happiness; unhappiness and disgrace follow being bad. For the daughter to be happy, she must be good because being good makes her parents happy, and she can only be happy if they are happy. Conditional happiness is how one person’s happiness is conditional upon another’s. When some people come first, their happiness comes first. For those who come after, happiness means being directed towards other people’s good. The daughter puts her parent’s happiness first by marrying, and then, when married, puts her husband’s happiness first. That happiness is predicated on her disappearance.”