On Putting Down and Destroying: Affective Economies of a Women-Only Club in Istanbul

Abstract

In ‘Happy Objects’, Sara Ahmed (2010) writes about how ‘family’ circulates as a happy object — an object that is supposed to deliver happiness to any and all subjects who attach to it. Affect is sticky Ahmed argues, and what makes such stickiness possible is the fact that affect circulates between objects, instead of residing in people as common sense would have it. As a result, affect ‘sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects’ (2010: 29). The promise of happiness through approaching, adopting and attaching to ‘the family’ intensifies as the family circulates as a happy object, simultaneously prescribing the family as a path to happiness, and presuming the unhappiness of those who are unable or unwilling to approach family as a social good. This means that the family is not only a happy object, but sustains its place as such by identifying those who do not reproduce its line as a cause of unhappiness, such as feminist kill-joys and unhappy queers.