The Politics of Othering in the 'Happy Soul': Historicising Abjection in the Promise of Joy for Childhood and Play

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the politics of othering embedded in the taken‐for‐granted association of childhood, play, joy, and happiness. It explores how these notions are historically inscribed as forms of otherness tied to the affective normativity of joy. Drawing on a historicising analysis, the article traces the conceptual slippages and epistemic drifts underlying these connections, showing how joy and happiness became entangled with ethico‐theological imaginaries of the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment moral theories. These entanglements constitute joy as a moral imperative in the images and narratives of childhood and play. The ethical attachment of joy to play generates distinctions that abnormalise those who fail to embody such joy as ‘other.’ These historical inscriptions are reassembled in the modern making of childhood, becoming naturalised through emerging psychologies and sciences in education as a global affective ideal. Framed as an objective form of knowledge about children, the notion of ‘childhood's play with joy’ circulates through discourses of development and health, (re)producing its ‘others,’ the abnormal and disabled (such as autism or ADHD)—those marked as joyless or excessively joyful. To conclude, the article calls for a capaciousness of joy in reimagining childhood and play: an openness that loosens current affective boundaries and makes space for multiplicities of childhood and bodies beyond the ‘happiness duty’.