The Queer Promise of Happiness: The Cinematic and Televisual Politics of Good Feeling

Abstract

Happiness is one of western culture’s most valorised emotions. It is frequently considered to be the emotion worthy of living one’s life in pursuit of. However, on the side of the left, happiness is often regarded with suspicion, recognised as operating in the service of neoliberal, sexist, racist, classist, homophobic, and normative agendas. More closely associated with advertising than radical leftist politics, happiness can, to name just a few examples, work to uphold dominant cultural ideals, drive materialism, mask cynical corporate agendas, justify inequality, sustain the illusion of meritocracy. It can function as a disciplinary demand, directing subjects along paths of generationally handed down convention and alienating those that do not feel appropriately. It can be an object requiring aggressive protection. Recently, however, a number of critics, activists and filmmakers, have turned to happiness and other positive emotions as objects of analysis. This dissertation builds on and contributes to this growing body of work concerned with the politics of good feeling. Although happiness is the main key term for this dissertation, good feeling, in its definitional capaciousness, in its capacity to encompass a range of emotional structures and affective experience, more accurately describes this thesis’s object of enquiry. This dissertation is less concerned with the ontology of any particular positive emotion than its agency—political, ideological, cinematic. It considers what good feeling does, or can do, when put in service of a queer political project. I do not offer a single theory of happiness, optimism, or feel good affect, nor are the texts selected on the basis that they collectively represent a single strategic relation to positive feeling. Rather, each chapter offers not only a specific model of good feeling with its own structure, fantasies, and experiential affects, but also a political vision and world view that is not necessarily consistent with that of the other texts. With an emphasis on what is enabling, felicitous, performative, rather than what is true or false, this thesis eschews the need for philosophical coherence between its texts, espousing the idea that divergent political discourses can operate side by side, differently advantageous within particular contexts. Each chapter explores the ways in which discourses of positive emotion can work to sustain contemporary structures of inequality, but also the ways in which the pursuit of, or attachment to, good feeling may direct one toward alternative social arrangements, modes of ethical being, and new norms for living. The films and television programs under consideration thematise the politics of positive feeling in a way that speaks not only to the body of anti-racist, feminist, queer, work on political feeling but to the erotic, gendered and class politics their respective forms. For instance, Todd Solondz’s Dark Horse’s examination of failure and optimism critiques the way in which the recent popularity of a production oriented mode of mise en scene analysis supports a cultural valorisation of mastery, masculinity, and modes of belonging based on mutual validation; HBO’s Enlightened’s exploration of happiness as ethical relationality sought through the discourses of the lowly genre of Buddhist self-help brings to light the historical institutionally-based taste hierarchies that uphold the cultural status of the recent genre of “Quality TV”. Demonstrating positive feeling’s capacity to shift dominant ways of seeing, Far From Heaven presents naïve optimism as a mode of fantasising such that the erotic subjectivity of Julianne Moore and Todd Haynes’s heroine remains visible even as she is looked upon as a spectacle of either aesthetic perfection or cultural abjection, while, through the psychoanalytic concepts of the gaze and the screen, Transparent intervene­­­­­s in dominant culture’s system of stratification in the visual domain through a televisual transmission of queer communal good feeling. With its chapters collectively supporting no single model of good feeling, or how it does, could or should work, this thesis offers a number of weak theories on the queer affordances of good feeling. It aims, overall, not only to seek out good feeling’s leftist political potential in the domain of representation, but to demonstrate the formally innovative ways in which the films and television programs under discussion make their queer contribution.