Contribution short abstract:

This presentation interrogates queer joy as a type of folklore, crafted with intention and articulated in vernacular terms. The inherent rebellion of queer joy reveals how pleasure is a form of social critique, demarcating how bodies are disciplined into alignment with normative social expectations.

Contribution long abstract:

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed describes how the Other—including the queer Other—is constructed by mainstream imaginaries as possessing outsized suffering, joy, or both. Neoliberal social contexts discipline bodies by presenting pleasure to be acceptable only as a reward for re/productivity and good conduct, foreclosing the potential for queer joy by virtue of queer lives being neither “good” nor reproductive. And yet queer joy exists, taunting normativity with the potential for its unwriting. This presentation interrogates queer joy as a type of folklore, crafted with intention and articulated in vernacular terms. And because queer joy grows from the rejection of normative social expectations, it challenges the idea that an analytical approach foregrounding the affective diverges from more conventional “hard" theoretical lenses; rather, it imbues those approaches with new perspective. As Ahmed points out in her article “Happy Objects”: “To be affected by something is to evaluate that thing. Evaluations are expressed in how bodies turn toward things. To give value to things is to shape what is near us. […] Happiness is an orientation toward the objects we come into contact with.” When a folk practice inspires joy, it prompts us to query how our bodies—literal or metaphorical—have oriented toward the source of that joy, and what they have, in that same movement, turned away from. The inherent rebellion of queer joy reveals how happiness and pleasure are agents of social critique.