Conclusion: Socializing Happiness (or, Why We Wrote an Unhappy Book)

In the conclusion the authors focus on a new mother named Nancy. Deeply invested in traditional gender and family scripts, Nancy struggles mightily to come to terms with the demands of mothering through precarity as the family braces for her husband’s impending layoff. The authors suggest that Nancy’s surging and fraught ordinary affects articulate both the heaviness and the potentiality that attends to contemporary motherhood. Caught up in broken promises and worn-down affective infrastructures, Nancy has to work hard to make sense of, and align with, her family situation, and she appears to be teetering on the verge of affective alienation. Reflecting on the insights from previous chapters, the authors wonder whether mothering through precarity, in wearing women down with the impossible work of privatizing happiness, is opening up new possibilities for family, collective caretaking, and socialized happiness.