The politics of pleasure: Promenading on the Corniche and beachgoing

Abstract

Can the pleasures of young Palestinian women from refugee camps in promenading on the Beirut seaside Corniche on a warm summer evening be political? Or days spent at women-only beaches? If so, how do we understand such pleasure as everyday practices, as a politics of the present moment, or conversely (or simultaneously) as mechanisms of being co-opted into a broader apparatus of consumerist ideology and capitalist complacency? Drawing on ethnographic research over 2 years I argue that these moments of pleasure are caesuras in the massive apparatus of power – welded from strands of work, neoliberal practice, nationalist certitudes and political exclusion – which binds these women. These acts of pleasure cannot easily be categorised as ‘resistance’ but I argue that they should not facilely be considered reinforcements of hegemonic control either. They are momentary and ephemeral recognitions of ordinary life lived in hard times, attempts at clawing back an instant of joy from the drudgery of the everyday, and a surrender to the enjoyment of conviviality in public and urban spaces. If they are at all political, they are so because such conviviality is ever harder to sustain in the calamity of hopelessness that characterises so much politics today.