The Promise of Happiness

Presents a cultural critique of the imperative to be happy. Combining philosophy and feminist cultural studies, this title reveals the affective and moral work performed by the 'happiness duty', the expectation that we made happy by taking part in that which is deemed good, and that by being happy ourselves, we will make others happy.

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."