Happy country’s killjoy: a dynamic childhood analysis

Abstract

This research is situated in the context of a Finnswede childhood in Finland: a linguistic minority in ‘the happiest country in the world’. The killjoy (Ahmed 2004) perspective resists prescriptions of happiness based on particular structures and ideals by reconsidering how child(hood) subjectivity is produced by and producing ways of understanding what emotional experiences come to mean in a particular social world: the good/bad child is read to be a social reproduction. Making use of the killjoy from an adult position, I transgress normative practices which produce codes of conduct and conditions of possibility by preventing other ways of being. I do this to reframe and re-imagine fixated or stuck child selves and subjectivities in ways that make them unstuck, by firstly, analysing the effects of societal and national culture; then classed and community culture; and finally familial and gendered culture.

Drawing on Butler (2005) and Barad (2007), a performative approach is used to make sense of how a child comes to know themselves within relations and worlds: holding the belief that one entity does not pre-exist the other, but both are formed through a dynamic engagement with each other. Expanding upon this, with psychoanalysis and Benjamin (2004), I strive toward (dis)entanglement: a self emerges through relating to others before separation can occur without losing a sense of interconnectedness. In line with performativity, memories of childhood cannot be fully nor autonomously grasped, but instead, the process of re-membering childhood is continuously shaping a person as an adult both similar and different to how they were as a child. This forms the basis for the methodology I have proposed: a ‘dynamic childhood analysis’ influenced by Gannon’s (2006) poststructural autoethnography and Wyatt’s (2019) creative-relational inquiry. By using vignettes, poetry, and photography, this methodology is based on a practice named ‘thinking through feeling’, drawing on Mazzei and Jackson’s (2012) thinking with theory and Serra Undurraga’s (2023) performative meta-reflexivity, amongst others.