'You beat 'em, we feed 'em!': Enfolding laughter and pride

- The affective politics of laughter is used to deepen understandings of the political potential of pride.
- Three modalities of Deleuze's understanding of “the fold” (individual, collective, and structural) are emphasized.
- Encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from survival, belonging, and inequality.
- Undoing dominant conceptions of pride as individual opens up social justice possibilities for utilizing affect politically.

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects.