Gendering happiness and its discontents

Clisby, Suzanne

Abstract

Providing an introductory framework to the Special Issue: Gendering Happiness: the power of pleasure, here I consider the highly gendered and political contexts of happiness, pleasure, desire, and the tyrannies of its converse discontents. As this special issue explores, pleasure and joy can be found in diverse contexts, but ones that are always intersectionally gendered and particularly situated. Just as the personal is political, happiness is not an individual, private emotion. Rather such emotions are socio-culturally situated, shifting through time and space, and embedded in normative social and moral codes regulating appropriate meanings of who should be happy, when, and how that happiness should be performed. Moreover, normative processes of gendering within socio-cultural patriarchal contexts or gender regimes can have significantly negative impacts on both women’s and men’s mental wellbeing. Through a gender analysis of happiness and its discontents we are able to locate and critically interrogate the intersections of gender and power at play in this complex politicised and structural arena of emotion.

Citation

Clisby, S. (2017). Gendering happiness and its discontents. Journal of gender studies, 26(1), 2-9. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1273362

• Journal Article Type: Editorial
• Acceptance Date: Dec 7, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jan 25, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017
• Deposit Date: Dec 19, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 27, 2018
• Journal: Journal of gender studies
• Print ISSN: 0958-9236
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Not Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 26
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 2-9
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2017.1273362
• Keywords: Happiness; Gender; Power; Pleasure; Tyranny; Desire; Patriarchy; Mental wellbeing
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/446176
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09589236.2017.1273362
• Additional Information: This is a description of an article which has been accepted for future publication in: Journal of gender studies. The article itself is not yet available for consultation.
• Contract Date: Dec 19, 2016