Theoretical consideration of how affect--and particularly happiness--shapes social orientations, such as gender, race, and class.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Why Happiness, Why Now? 1
1. Happy Objects 21
2. Feminist Killjoys 50
3. Unhappy Queers 88
4. Melancholic Migrants 121
5. Happy Futures 160
Conclusion: Happiness, Ethics, Possibility 199
Notes 225
References 283
Index 301

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, also published by Duke University Press; The Cultural Politics of Emotion; Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality; and Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism.