Sara Ahmed

The very expectation of happiness gives us a specific image of the future. This is why happiness provides the emotional setting for disappointment, even if happiness is not given: we just have to expect happiness from “this or that” for “this and that” to be experienceable as objects of disappointment.

We could say that happiness is promised through proximity to certain objects. Objects would refer not only to physical or material things but also to anything that we imagine might lead us to happiness, including objects in the sense of values, practice, styles, as well as aspirations.

To promise after all is to make the future into an object, into something that can be declared in advance of its arrival.

The promise of happiness is what makes some things promising, as if to share in things is to share in happiness. When something promises happiness, we have an idea of that thing as being promising. In receiving that something, we imagine the good things that will follow.

Happiness by providing a container in which we can deposit our wants might also contain those wants.

He suggests that something does not become good for us “until our desire … makes us uneasy in the want of it”

The complainer, rather like the diversity practitioner, knows all about stoppages and blockages, where they happen, when they happen, how they happen. I

To make use of policies in a complaint is often to point to their failure to be followed.

By “nonperformative” I refer to institutional speech acts that do not bring into effect what they name

To make a complaint is often to find a gap, a gap between what