Abstract

Sara Ahmed's work allows us to think of happiness as an emotional regime of government that is distinctive of the «affective turn». The author addresses the way in which affects operate as disciplinary mechanisms in an intensified manner in what she precisely calls the contemporary «happiness turn». However, drawing from Ahmed's figure of the feminist killjoy, this relationship between power and happiness can also be thought of as an experience of transformation of the personal into the political. Feminist politicisation through unhappiness makes it possible to imagine other worlds and other ways of living that deviate from the normativity of the happiness discourses that dominate the present.