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The recognition of queers can be narrated as the hope or promise of be- coming acceptable, where in being acceptable you must become acceptable to a world that has already decided what is acceptable. Recognition becomes a gift given from the straight world to queers, which conceals queer labor and struggle (see Schulman 1998: 102), the life worlds generated by queer activ- ism. It is as if such recognition is a form of straight hospitality, which in turn positions happy queers as guests in other people’s homes, reliant on their con- tinuing good will. In such a world you are asked to be grateful for the bits and pieces that you are given. To be a guest is to experience a moral obligation to be on your best behavior, such that to refuse to fulfil this obligation would threaten your right to coexistence. The happy queer, who has good manners, who is seated at the table in the right way, might be a strategic form of occupy- ing an uncivil world. But strategic occupations can keep things in place. Or we can stay in place through the effort of an occupation. Queer activisms create “a place at the table” in the hope that the table will not keep its place (Ahmed 2006: 174). A revolution of unhappiness might require an unhousing; it would require not legitimating more relationships, more houses, even more tables but delegitimating the world that “houses” some bodies and not others. The political energy of unhappy queers might depend on not being in house.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 106)

The depiction of the costs of happy heterosexuality involves the work of social critique: a collective rebellion against this very script, or at least a flight from the violence of its demand.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 105)

To deviate from the line is to be threatened with unhappiness. The unhappiness of the deviant has a powerful function as a perverse promise (if you do this, you will get that!), as a promise that is simultaneously a threat (so don’t do that!). Happiness scripts are powerful even when we fail or refuse to follow them, even when desires deviate from their lines. In this way, the scripts speak a certain truth: deviation can involve unhappiness. Happiness scripts encourage us to avoid the unhappy consequences of deviation by making those consequences explicit. The “whole world,” it might seem, depends on subjects being directed in the right way, toward the right kind of things. To deviate is always to risk a world even if you don’t always lose the world you risk. Queer and feminist histories are the histories of those who are willing to risk the con- sequences of deviation. Happiness is not just how subjects speak of their own desires but also what they want to give and receive from others. Happiness involves reciprocal forms of aspiration (I am happy for you, I want you to be happy, I am happy if you are happy) and also forms of coercion that are exercised and concealed by the very language of reciprocity, such that one person’s happiness is made conditional not only on another person’s happiness but on that person’s willingness to be made happy by the same things.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 91)

Let’s take this figure of the feminist killjoy seriously. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced, or negated under public signs of joy? Does bad feeling enter the room when somebody expresses anger about things, or could anger be the moment when the bad feelings that circulate through objects get brought to the surface in a certain way? Feminist subjects might bring others down not only by talking about unhappy topics such as sexism but by exposing how happiness is sustained by erasing the very signs of not getting along. Feminists do kill joy in a certain sense: they disturb the very fantasy that happiness can be found in certain places. To kill a fantasy can still kill a feeling. It is not just that feminists might not be happily affected by the objects that are supposed to cause happiness but that their failure to be happy is read as sabotaging the happiness of others.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 66 - 67)

The figure of the female troublemaker thus shares the same horizon with the figure of the feminist killjoy. Both figures are intelligible if they are read through the lens of the history of happiness. Feminists might kill joy simply by not finding the objects that promise happiness to be quite so promising. The word feminism is thus saturated with unhappiness.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 64 - 65)

Any deviation from gender roles defined in terms of women being trained to make men happy is a deviation from the happiness of all. (...) Women must learn to make men happy in order to keep families together, in order to prevent recreation from taking place elsewhere. It is women’s duty to keep happiness in house.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 55)

(...) happiness is not so much what the housewife has but what she does: her duty is to generate happiness by the very act of embracing this image.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 53)

How better to justify an unequal distribution of labor than to say that such labor makes people happy? How better to secure consent to unpaid or poorly paid labor than to describe such consent as the origin of good feeling?

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 50)

The happy family is both a myth of happiness, of where and how happiness takes place, and a powerful legislative device, a way of distributing time, energy, and resources. The family is also an inheritance. To inherit the family can be to acquire an orientation toward some things and not others as the cause of happiness. In other words, it is not just that groups cohere around happy objects; we are asked to reproduce what we inherit by being affected in the right way by the right things.

— The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed (Page 45)