Though it is vital to attend to oppression and inequality, telling stories about trans joy helps scholars, trans people, and the public understand the full complexity of trans people’s lived experiences. Noticing, nurturing, and celebrating joy is a vital form of resistance for marginalized communities.
JonesAngela. 2020. Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry. New York: New York University Press. Providing a sociological theory of pleasure and demonstrating the value of centering pleasure in sociological research, this book reveals the pleasures and joys found in marginalized and stigmatized forms of employment.
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KrollChristian. 2014. “Towards a Sociology of Happiness: The Case of an Age Perspective on the Social Context of Well-Being,” Sociological Research Online19(2). Although sociologists have the tools to study happiness, this work shows how there is hesitancy to do so because it is assumed that studying positive emotions takes away from focusing on inequalities.
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LuJessica H.SteeleCatherine Knight. 2019. “‘Joy Is Resistance’: Cross-Platform Resilience and (Re)Invention of Black Oral Culture Online,” Information, Communication & Society22(6). By documenting how social media platforms are used to foster Black joy, this article demonstrates that experiencing joy and oppression are not mutually exclusive and that centering Black joy is a form of resistance to anti-Black oppression.
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ShusterStef M.WestbrookLaurel. 2022. “Reducing the Joy Deficit in Sociology: A Study of Transgender Joy,” Social Problems. https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spac034. This article presents a detailed analysis of trans joy, explains how the joy deficit in sociology is a problem, and shows how attending to joy adds complexity to beliefs about being from a marginalized group.
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WinderTerrell J.A.2023. “Unspoiling Identity: An Intersectional Expansion of Stigma Response Strategies” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity9(2). Introduces the concept of unspoiling identity to demonstrate how members of intersectionally marginalized groups such as Black gay men reject the dominant assumption that marginalized identities are always-already inferior.
