Happiness (or not) after rape: hysterics and harpies in the media versus killjoys in black women’s fiction

Abstract

This paper argues that Sara Ahmed’s theorizing of the feminist killjoy is very relevant to the treatment of the rape victim in public discourse. The analysis draws on Ahmed’s categorization of different kinds of killjoys to consider how, in media representations, rape victims are confronted with particularly reductive and simplistic happiness scripts. These scripts present victims as being unreliable, because they are seen as irrevocably harmed, or they supposedly cause their own unhappiness with their refusal to move on from the pain of their experiences. Having established the ambivalences of the media framing of rape survivors, fictional representations reveal the true complexities of happiness for rape survivors in the discussion of two novels: The Color Purple by Alice Walker (born 1944) and Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (born 1969). Walker and Danticat emphasize that heteronormative scripts of happiness are inadequate in such cases, and that survivors must be allowed the right to be unhappy in a quest for justice. Ultimately, a more complex understanding of happiness admits that while the process of healing is not necessarily simple or swift for victims, there are possibilities for joy beyond normative understandings of what contentment might mean.

Keywords:

• Happiness
• sexual violence
• feminist killjoy
• literature
• media
• black women writers

Acknowledgments

I sincerely wish that I had more space in this essay to broaden the kinds of victims’ experiences of rape and rape culture, including trans women, men, and Native American women for example. My future work, however, will be dedicated to working on these groups to a greater extent.