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Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1: Optimism and Its Opposite -- Chapter 2: Talking to Yourself -- Chapter 3: Learning Optimism -- Chapter 4: Spreading Optimism -- Glossary -- For More Information -- Websites -- For Further Reading -- Bibliography -- Index -- Back Cover

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Success and Attitude -- What is Optimism? -- Expect the Best! -- Focus on the Positive -- He's an Optimist! -- An Inner Resource -- Encouraging Others -- Growing Your Optimism -- Finding a Balance -- My Report Card: Optimism -- Glossary -- Index -- Websites -- Back Cover

A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing. Offering bold new ways of conceiving the present, Lauren Berlant describes the cruel optimism that has prevailed since the 1980s, as the social-democratic promise of the postwar period in the United States and Europe has retracted. People have remained attached to unachievable fantasies of the good life—with its promises of upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, and durable intimacy—despite evidence that liberal-capitalist societies can no longer be counted on to provide opportunities for individuals to make their lives "add up to something."Arguing that the historical present is perceived affectively before it is understood in any other way, Berlant traces affective and aesthetic responses to the dramas of adjustment that unfold amid talk of precarity, contingency, and crisis. She suggests that our stretched-out present is characterized by new modes of temporality, and she explains why trauma theory—with its focus on reactions to the exceptional event that shatters the ordinary—is not useful for understanding the ways that people adjust over time, once crisis itself has become ordinary. Cruel Optimism is a remarkable affective history of the present

Colonial aesthetics, obscenity trials, masculine hysteria, crime scene photography, sexology, the production and obfuscation of the lesbian throughout modernity, and the contemporary collapse of post-war social housing projects, all intersect in Domestic Optimism – Sexually Dissident Domestic Design, a critical queer and working class reading of architecture, furniture, and modernist aesthetics. The performance enacts forms of inscription, temporal displacements, and slippages from a much-ignored 'sapphic' modernity, making a mess of outdated museum display and exhausted historical legacies. The designer Eileen Gray has been an important figure in the project's research, not as a singular heroic modernist fit for canonization, but as a collectively involved queer woman, part of an extended peer group of dykey women makers in Paris throughout the early twentieth century. Domestic Optimism – Sexually Dissident Domestic Design is the third and last act of a trilogy of works developed by Emma Wolf-Haugh over recent years: The Re-appropriation of Sensuality (re-designing the sex club for dykes, queer women, and trans folk), Sex in Public (marking and performing cruising sites for dykes, queer women, and trans folk), and Domestic Optimism (sexually dissident domestic design). As with the previous two acts, the project engages historically with a queer-feminist bent, and generates its own stages for discourse with collaborative 'Reading Troupe' workshops and zine publication, as well as exhibitions approached through scenography and performance. Emma Wolf-Haugh is a visual artist and educator. Weaving together installation, performance, publishing, and collaborative workshop techniques, she is interested in re-orienting attention in relation to cultural narratives, and develops work from a queer/feminist questioning of what is missing. Her previous experience in theatre and queer DIY club scenes has led to a continuing engagement with the aesthetics of club culture, along with questions of spatial politics and an ...