Is Happiness a Fantasy Only for the Privileged? Exploring Women's Classed Chances of Being Happy Through Alcohol Consumption During COVID-19

Abstract

This chapter uses the pandemic crisis to explore the social processes that structure happiness and shape fantasies of living a happy life. Considered herein are issues of human potential, gendered and classed possibility and people’s differing chances in cultivating a sense of satisfaction in ‘being happy’, despite living through COVID-19. Interviews with 40 Australian women living during lockdown restrictions with varying levels of social, cultural and economic capital are utilised to make sense of women’s happiness. Vastly different avenues for achieving a happiness fantasy outside of drinking alcohol were possible for more privileged women than for those in middle and working classes. The classed differences in women’s gendered roles in managing emotions (their own and other people’s) and their chances to be happy are exemplified in how the changes to the structure of the day that resulted from COVID-19 restrictions did not devastate or cause stress (as we heard from working-class women) or need to be filtered or blocked out using alcohol in order to retain balanced emotions (as we heard from middle-class women) but rather provided an opportunity to celebrate the achievement of their happiness fantasy. We deduce that for those with less agency available to control their chances of living a happy life, prevailing COVID-19 discourse that places happiness within individual responsibility and focuses on personal resilience rather than tending to the conditions for flourishing, is problematic.