Barbie, Taylor, Beyoncé, and the Era of Joy
“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.”
– Audre Lorde
Do you feel it?
Maybe you can hear it?
It feels like anticipation rising until it can’t be contained anymore, finally exploding like a firework into a million sparks of colour and light. And it sounds like an arena full of screaming fans.
It’s movie theatres full of strangers dressed in pink cowboy hats and jumpsuits. It’s crowds of girls, gays and theys singing along to Taylor and Beyoncé and Harry in their cutest outfits, bejeweled hearts around their eyes and rainbows painted onto their skin. It’s a line around the block for the opening of The Ripped Bodice, an indie bookstore the colour of cotton candy that’s woman-owned, queer-owned, and caters specifically to romance lovers. It’s WGA/SAG AFTRA strikers organizing themed days to keep their energy high, like Taylor Tuesday, Back to the ‘90s and Trans Takeover. It’s tiktokers romanticizing their daily lives, taking mundane tasks and turning them into rose-coloured rituals. It’s millions of people all over the world cheering for female athletes – many of them queer – during the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
This cultural phenomenon we are experiencing, this Era of Joy, isn’t some shallow attempt to ignore the pain of the world. Girls, women, nonbinary people, queers – the people who have been denied joy the most – are collectively reclaiming it and spreading it without caring what anybody else thinks, maybe for the first time.
We are arming ourselves in pink, sprinkling ourselves with glitter, draping ourselves in feather boas, and stepping into a world that has always told us to be ashamed of everything that brings us happiness.
Do you understand how courageous that is?
We are rocking up to cinemas, to arenas, to protests, to the voting booths, to bookstore openings, and literally shaking the ground with our pure, unapologetic joy.
Like most people raised female in our misogynistic, patriarchal society, I picked up the belief that feminine joy is shameful. That being feminine or girly was not something to aspire to if I wanted to be taken seriously. But with this phenomenon of Barbie, Taylor, Beyoncé, queerness, intersectional feminism, and even the Gen Z-powered 90s nostalgia reboot, we are waking up to the fact that we can be feminine and powerful. We can be girly and take no shit. If Barbie can wear bubblegum pink and be an astronaut, a president, a doctor, an author, why can’t we?
In reclaiming our feminine joy, our girlhood, we are reclaiming our power. And by looking at the cultural shift that’s happening, I think we are reclaiming our community, too.
With the Era of Joy upon us, I hope this means the Era of Snark is ending. Social media snark has become its own language over the last decade, largely thanks to Twitter and its culture of hot takes and take downs. It absolutely became part of my online and IRL personality – which had previously been much more bubbly, optimistic, and light-hearted. Slowly I stopped seeking joy and started seeking outrage, just like the algorithm wanted.
Somehow, amid internalizing all that sexism and misogyny, I started to believe that ALL joy was shameful. That it should be hidden, kept to myself, and that I definitely shouldn’t let myself experience it for too long. How could I let myself feel joy when there is so much pain in the world? Joy is selfish! Joy is unproductive! Joy is unrealistic! And the big one: joy means something bad is just around the corner.
Do you know what happens when you deny yourself joy? You start to resent anyone who openly expresses it. You walk past a group of friends having brunch in a busy Brooklyn restaurant – people you don’t even know! – and assume they don’t care about COVID. You get jealous of friends going to Europe and tell yourself some imaginary story about family money and classism and late-stage capitalism. You see other authors celebrating at book events and suddenly it becomes about you and how nobody likes you and never will and you’ll never succeed.
Suddenly you’re not only denying yourself joy, but you’re also judging everyone else for feeling and sharing joy, too.
It feels shitty and miserable and leaves a bitter taste in your mouth. And then you end up talking about it with your therapist, who gently points out that maybe you’re holding others to the same impossible standards that you hold yourself to, and maybe that’s not healthy for anyone.
In short, denying joy turns you into an asshole.
The poet Toi Derricotte wrote that joy is an act of resistance. It’s often shortened to ‘joy is resistance,’ but I think that leaves out the most important word: act.
Joy isn’t just a feeling, it’s not something that happens to us, it’s an act. An action. It’s something we make happen. Joy takes work.
That’s where I’ve been getting lost. I’ve been waiting for joy to come to me, like I did as a child in a butterfly house, silently begging a Ulysses to land on my open palm. And if one didn’t, oh how rejected I’d feel that I hadn’t been chosen.
I’ve been treating joy as if it were a Ulysses butterfly, waiting for it to choose me. But joy doesn’t choose us, we choose joy. Gross, what a tacky cliché. I sound like a caption underneath a Christian Girl Autumn post on Instagram. Blergh.
Don’t get it confused, I’m not saying the answer to life’s very real problems is to simply ‘choose joy!’ or ‘think positive!’ Hell no. Life is hard, and unfair, and we live under an oppressive white supremacist patriarchy that lets us die for profit. And yet, we resist. Joy is part of that resistance, as Toi Derricotte wrote, and we shouldn’t feel guilty for making joy happen for us.
As a queer, disabled person, it is revolutionary for me to be visibly joyful. It makes me an example for younger queer, disabled people to look at and say, “maybe happiness can be for me, too.” And it shows nondisabled people that the messages they’ve received about disabled folks aren’t accurate.
Society has this narrative that we are the worst-case scenario. Nondisabled people think we must be miserable, tortured, sitting by a window wishing we could be like everyone else. Either that or we should be extraordinary, something for nondisabled folks to point to and say “What an inspiration! If they can overcome their terrible burden, then my problems aren’t that bad!”
It's hard to avoid this narrative. We’ve been fed it in media since forever. Growing up, it’s all I saw about disabled people, so it’s what I believed, too. But then I listened to and read books by disabled people, and knew better. So now, as I sit here thinking about joy, and how I can counteract the narrative that society has built around disabled people, I realize it’s not that complicated.
Share the joy.
I need to share my queer, disabled joy as much as I can.
So I, for one, welcome this new Era of Joy. In a time when so many people have been united in hate, it gives me hope to see a resurgence of people united by what they love. Hate is lazy. It’s easy and boring and lacks imagination. But joy? Hope? You gotta be brave to carry those with you.
What brings me joy?
Books. My cats. That first iced coffee in the morning. My wife. Rainbows. Fresh flowers. Talking to my plants. The colour pink. Barbie. Harry Styles. My Bluey plushie. Making people laugh. Taylor Swift. Writing this substack. The pretty photos my friends post to Instagram. Bookstores. Girls, gays and theys. Doing my makeup. Glitter. Weighted blankets. Dinosaurs. Birdwatching. Lavender and frangipani. Sweaters. The Mets. Cat videos. Astrology memes. Politics podcasts. Romcoms. Dolphins. Nachos. Fall candles. Seeing queer, disabled folks thrive.
What about you?
And now, for the Harry of the Week!
