Grasping the affirmative: Power and the process of becoming joyful academic subjects

We investigate becoming joyful subjects in academia among feminist geographers using the methodology of collective biography. Collective biography uses the researchers' own written memories about a set of experiences as texts for analysis. This paper brings together ideas about ontological positivity and power and applies them to the process of subjectification. We use the concepts potentia and potestas to explore force relations that generate particular subjects: here, joyful ones. We suggest that the generation of joyful subjects, even momentarily, helps to sustain the possibility of an affirmative politics. Joy, as an effect of the positivity of power, offers one pathway towards engaging varied feminist world-making projects within the academy, and beyond.