‘You beat ‘em, we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride

Emotion, Space and Society 23 (2017) 33e39

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‘You beat ‘em, we feed ‘em!’: Enfolding laughter and pride Randi Nixon Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, 9627-80ave, Edmonton, AB, T6C 0V2, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 22 January 2016 Received in revised form 28 February 2017 Accepted 1 March 2017

In this article I use the affective politics of laughter as an entry point into broadening understandings of the political potentiality of the everyday geographies of pride, centralizing in my analysis a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I look to the ways in which the encounters between laughter and pride in this space expose its inextricability from bodily vitality and survival, feelings of collective belonging, and structural realities and inequalities. Using Gilles Deleuze's concept of the fold to structure my analysis, I use laughter as a lens to advance an understanding of pride that emphasizes its entanglement with collective affect and its immanent multiplicity as it is embodied through everyday encounters with difference. I emphasize the affective component of laughter's foldings as a means to think through the way vibrational pulls, pushes, tenors and tones work to move bodies toward or away from collectives, spaces, politics, ideas, relationships and ways of living. Exploring pride through the affective politics of laughter is a way to advance understandings of pride as emerging always in relation to collectives, histories, and spaces, rather than as an individual trait. Such a reframing has implications for understanding affective politics as a resource for social justice projects. © 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Pride Laughter Affect The fold Embodiment

1. Introduction In this article, I explore the dynamic relationship between affective geographies of laughter and the emotional geographies of pride in a safe house for women involved in street level sex work. I argue that attending to the relationship between laughter and pride in this space can offer insights to social justice politics, specifically regarding the importance of affect and bodily vitality to contemporary political projects. The capacity for laughter to infect bodies across sites of difference is key to its political potentiality, and as such, opens up possibilities for understanding pride outside of an individualized frame, and rather as having the capacity to bind disparate collectives across difference. In addition to contributing to Deleuzian strands of affect theory, this paper contributes to the field of critical geography, particularly its aims of political inclusion of marginalized populations (Hubbard, 1999), as well as emerging work on geographies of sound in relation to space (Doughty et al., 2016; Hemsworth, 2016). The political possibilities of laughter's multiplicity in the house is used as an entry point into deeper understandings of the affective sociality of pride, examined through three modalities of Deleuze's conceptualization of the fold - the individual, collective, and

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structural (Deleuze, 1992, 1988). At the level of the individual, laughter, like pride, can uplift and enhance individual capacity or it can be used to mock, shrink, and disempower. When understood in relation to bodily vitality and substance laughter can act as a protective mechanism that has an affective relationship to pride. At the level of the collective, laughter and pride are intimately connected to processes of inclusion and exclusion, as each have the capacity to strengthen and reproduce group rules and boundaries. Conversely, because quick shifts in tone, duration, and intensity (laughing too hard or too long, being too proud or not proud enough) can illicit skepticism or evoke hostility, those same group bonds can be loosened and destabilized. The affective force of laughter, like that of pride, works to attract and repel bodies into and out of collective folds, and is hence intimately wrapped up in processes of inclusion and exclusion. At the structural level, laughter and pride can manifest “with” power (e.g. national pride expressed through mocking immigrants) as well as “at” power (e.g. fat pride expressed through mocking dieting), indicating its potential to both challenge and reinforce long-established social hierarchies. As such, laughter is one entry point into thinking through the ways pride is enfolded into and out of individuals and collectives, constituting the boundaries of each. In the context of marginality in which I focus my analysis, an inner-city drop-in center for sex workers, the ways laughter exposes pride is particularly stark. In this space, people who are

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structurally denied bodily vitality through histories and presents of colonization, racism, sexism and transphobia are built up through expressions of hearty laughter and group pride. The snapshot I give of this space is intended to grant a level of complexity and agency that is usually only given to the structurally privileged, and to cautiously push against the way the space may be imagined as one of shame and despair. The dynamics of the house, which are perpetually being (re)constituted by the women who move through it, challenge dominant understandings of laughter, pride, and the political potentiality of each. The house is a satellite of a community owned and operated inner-city medical clinic in a mid-sized Canadian city. Aside from a small, usually cramped and slightly disheveled office where everyone is required to drop their belongings, the rest of the space feels much like a 1970s top-floor apartment: a central kitchen with a large communal table, couched between two sitting rooms, one usually dark and filled with people napping or watching TV; the other, light with people visiting, going through clothing, or getting ready for the night. As a temporary retreat from the harshness of street life but still very much shaped by street hierarchies and realities, the house is a place where intersecting historical structures of inequality materialize as everyday crises. It is a refuge from the barrage of negative affective, physical and psychic assaults that routinely occur outside its door - police, johns,1 eviction notices, drug seeking, debt collecting, withdrawals, rain, hail, blistering cold, hunger, and sleep deprivation. Following a literature review and methodological discussion, the article will be broken into three sections, each attentive to a different register of enfolding laughter and pride in the house (individual, collective, structural). The first section explores the dynamic relationship of individual laughter and pride upon crossing the threshold (door) into the house, and the way laughter and pride converge as a demonstration of bodily vitality and substance. The second section examines the way pride and laughter are inextricable from understandings of collective identity (collective folds), explored through notions of the ‘inside joke’ and responses I solicited on a poster board in the house. The last section synthesizes the previous sections, connecting the contours of laughter and pride in the space to the inescapable folds of structural oppression. Taken together, these sections emphasize the mutual constitution of the individual, collective, and structural through attention to the geographies of pride and laughter in the house. 2. Literature review Human geographers have long since established the role of place in the ongoing constitution of the self (Bondi et al., 2002; Cresswell, 2004; Pile and Thrift, 1995). This extensive and growing literature has examined the mutually constitutive relationship of spaces and identities, (Lefebvre, 1991), including geographies of home and belonging (Blunt and Varley, 2004), spatialities of class (Dowling, 2009), everyday geographies (Askins, 2015), geographies of sound (Doughty et al., 2016), and the relationship between spaces and social hierarchies (Cresswell, 1996;

1 The association between the term ‘john’ and an anti-sex work position has recently been brought to my attention, and that ‘client’ is the preferred pro-sex work term. That said, in this paper I will continue to use ‘john’ for two reasons. First, the women at the house are referred to as ‘clients’ by the staff and wider organization. Secondly, I have never heard the term ‘client’ used by women in the house to refer to the people with whom they exchange money for sex (‘trick’, ‘date’, or ‘boyfriend’ are used). While I adamantly support individuals who choose to engage in sex work, as well as their chosen language, the demographic of women at the house are primarily involved in street level sex work, which could explain terminological differences.

Hubbard and Sanders, 2003) to name a few. Critical geographers such as Hubbard (1999) have expressed a heightened interest in “exploring the importance of space in shaping life chances of marginalized populations” and producing research that may “promote the political inclusion” of marginalized people (Hubbard, 1999: 229e233). Others have emphasized the way identities and collective relations are constituted and reinforced through the movements across borders and between spaces. For example, using the murder of an indigenous woman, Pamela George, as her case, Razack (2002) makes a powerful argument for the relationship between racialized spaces, spatialized justice, and the constitution of the white masculine settler subject. Razack lucidly articulates the way histories (and presents) of white men entering racialized spaces to dominate and exploit colonized people, women in particular, are crucial to the (re)making of colonized and colonizer subjectivities. That is, the embodied acts of crossing into and out of particular spaces is the raw material for subject constitution. One theoretical entry point into the notion of movement into and out of spaces as crucial to identity construction is Deleuze's concept of “the fold” (1988; 1992). While Deleuze is not known for his interest in space per se, “the fold” is undeniably spatial and material in its articulation of the ‘inside’ as constituted through ongoing processes of enfolding that which is ‘outside.’ The coherence (or identity) of the interior space is produced through the perpetual negotiation of affective encounters between inside and outside. The histories of these encounters are what give relative stability and predictability to the patterns of the ‘inside,’ despite the necessary permeability of the boundary between inside and outside. Processes of enfolding (or inclusion) are in the same movement processes of rejection and exclusion, as these movements into and out of the inside space are what constitutes the inside always in relation to that which is brought in from outside, or explicitly kept out. Here Hubbard and Sanders (2003) use the term ‘folding,’ in a colloquial sense to describe the geography of sex work as: “… the outcome of an unfolding relationship between different types of space e the ordered spaces of the capitalist state on the one hand, and the ‘lived’ spaces of prostitutes on the other. These spaces are not mutually exclusive, however, they fold into one another in particular ways, bequeathing distinctive geographies of sex work.” (75e76). What the authors point to here is the way spaces shape or “command bodies” according to social hierarchies (Lefebvre, 1991: 121). Given the inextricability of space and the body in the constitution and maintenance of identity and social hierarchies, questions surrounding affect and emotion have become of interest to human geographers. According to Davidson et al. (2005), “emotional geographies” attempt “to understand emotion e experientially and conceptually e in terms of its socio-spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorized subjective mental states” (3). Understood in this way, emotions are not contained within individuals and expressed outward, but rather, emerge and retreat, wax and wane, swell and shrink, within particular socio-spatial contexts. Pile (2010) has noted that the relationship between emotional and affective geographies depends on how the relationship between affect and emotion is conceptualized. I will now take a brief detour through affect theory to clarify how the relationship between affect and emotion shapes my exploration of pride and laughter in this space. Within the last decade there has been an explosion of academic interest in the affective realm (Ahmed, 2004; Anderson, 2009; Berlant, 2011; Blackman, 2012; Blackman and Venn, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Connolly, 2002; Massumi, 2002; Probyn, 2005;

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Protevi, 2009; Stewart, 2007). This literature is vast and continues to expand in its exploration of affect from a variety of theoretical orientations and their attending epistemological and methodological commitments and challenges. Following a Deleuzian reading of Spinoza, affect is defined as the perpetual changes in the body's capacity to act, and “at the same time the idea of the affection” (Massumi, 2002: 31). This definition of affect is prevalent and used by several theorists who understand affect an embodied intensity that escapes the speaking subject (Blackman and Venn, 2010: 9), exists in the non-representational domain (Thrift, 2004, 2008), and exceeds the capture of language (Massumi, 2002). Massumi is often cited for his distinction between affect and emotion, which posits affect as synonymous with (bodily) intensity, and emotion as the recognition and capture of affect into sociohistorically appropriate linguistic categories (2002: 28, 35, 61). So for example, affect may register on the body as a quickening heart rate, goose bumps, and flushed cheeks, while the recognition and naming of said intensities as “anger” or “fear” is emotion. This distinction is an important entry point into my analysis in this paper, in that I explore the ways the emotional geography of pride (as a named emotional capture of various affects) and the affective geography of laughter (a non-linguistic yet deeply social bodily intensity) encountered one another in the house. Critiques of the clear-cut distinction between affect and emotion that posit affect as separate from discourse and circuits of meaningmeaning (and the realm of emotion) have been outlined by several theorists; Tolia-Kelly (2006) has problematized its universalist and ethnocentric tendencies when not tethered to lived differences and structural inequalities, Leys (2011) has called into question the interpretation of key experiments that have been used by cultural theorists to claim affect as prior to intentionality, and Wetherell's (2012; 2013) work carefully examines the methodological implications of the supposed theoretical divide between affect and discourse. I have attempted to ward off the slip into universalism by situating my exploration of the affective politics of laughter in the house, attending to the particularities of the space, and to critically utilize the distinction between affect and emotion outlined by Massumi to put affect theory into practice. 3. Methodology Discussing research practice, Barad conceptualizes objectivity as a “responsibility to the entanglements of which we are a part” and recognition of what it means to be part of and close to our research in multiple ways that are potentially uncomfortable (Dophijn and van der Tuin, 2012: 52). The responsibility to the entanglements of which we are apart is particularly “fraught with moral and logistical problems” when doing work with individuals involved in street-level sex work, as researchers become inserted “into a complex constellation of ethical and political issues” (Hubbard and Sanders, 2003: 27; Hubbard, 1999: 235). What follows will be a brief explanation and description of how I tentatively became engaged in research with sex workers, and how I ethically negotiated, and continue to negotiate, these entanglements. This paper is part of a larger project that explores individual feelings of pride in relation to the political sense-making capacities of collectives and wider structural and historical realities. While working as a client-support worker at the house, I found that my work on pride was being heavily influenced by my time there, which, after informal discussions with staff and clients, prompted

2 All fieldwork that occurred in the house was approved by the Review Ethics Board (REB) at the University of Alberta, and all identifying characteristics of clients have been omitted.

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me to formally incorporate what was happening in the space into my work.2 I used a mixed-method approach attuned to the affective (non-linguistic, vibrational, collective) components of laughter as a means to become more attuned to the embodied and relational aspects of proud feelings. These methods were not only theoretically appropriate to the research, but more importantly, to what was ethically appropriate in the space. Both staff and clients were aware of the fieldwork occurring in the house, and since my interest was not sex work but how pride functioned in the space, it was collectively agreed that potential harms were minimal. I chose not to interview clients so as to not disrupt the rhythm of the space, and to ensure that my role in the space as a support worker and my relationships with clients were not put at risk. Additionally, Hubbard has questioned “the appropriateness of in-depth interviewing as the pragmatic ‘critical’ method” when doing research with sex work, as his “belief that conversations are necessarily equitable and empowering was quickly exposed as naïve” (Hubbard, 1999: 232e233). Instead, I relied predominantly on participant observation and an arts-based method of data collection by placing blank poster boards in the washroom. The poster boards remained in the washroom for three months, and were replaced with empty ones when full. On each poster were a series of prompts about pride including, “what does pride feel like?” and “proud to be …”. The washroom was chosen because of its anonymity and the guaranteed time and privacy that would be allowed with the poster, if so chosen. Further, the placement of the washroom e at the top of the stairs between the office and exit e ensured a certain amount of traffic, adding to collective intensity of the area. As stated above, pride was the intended and primary object of interest. That said, after observing the interactions between people at the washroom door that often accompanied shared laughter or solitary chuckles, I began to attune myself to the vital social role of laughter in the house. Laughter had been something staff had often discussed e our own laughter as a coping mechanism, the laughter of the clients that persistently flew in the face of the realities of their struggles e but its relationship to pride emerged in the space through the interactions prompted by the poster. Attention to the politics of laughter in relation to pride extends my claim that understanding the contemporary political landscape requires as much attention to bodily forces, vibrations, shocks, and spatial negotiations as to language and discourse (e.g. policy, law, explicit forms of political representation). As an affective intensity in perpetual flux, laughter “moves bodies, a vibration physically pushing and pulling their material fabric” (Gallagher, 2016: 43). The existing scientific scholarship on laughter tends to be marked by its attempts to capture its movement, narrate its intensity, to ‘know’ its nature, thus minimizing the political threat posed by its unknowability. In contrast, I do not seek to know laughter but to use its methodologically elusive character and the unpredictability of its contagion3 as a key element in understandings of everyday experiences of pride. Such an exploration can bolster an orientation to social justice politics that favours the cultivation of bodily vitality, humility, and collective social joy across difference that may decenter the dominance of shame-based identity politics. 3.1. Laughter, the individual, and bodily vitality In 2014 I was working as a client support worker at the house. As

3 For an engrossing and in-depth discussion on the contagion of affect in general, see Teresa Brennan's The Transmission of Affect (2004), and for explorations of the contagion of laughter in particular, see and Provine (1992).

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a white, cis-gendered, mostly middle-class, academic, my learning curve was steep. What I quickly learned was that much of what happened inside the house was conditioned by events that had happened outside e an eviction notice, a bad date (an encounter between a sex worker and john that turned physically, sexually, or economically violent), a fight with a friend over lost or stolen belongings, an unpaid debt e and as a result the moment of crossing the threshold into the space was a significant one. I often found myself moving swiftly through the narrow hallway and down the well-worn and paint chipped staircase to a door that led to an inner city back alley, anticipating who would be on the other side and the state they would be in. The mood of the encounters at the door varied from impatient relief to enthusiastic familiarity, but regardless, I quickly learned to open the door by cracking a joke, finding that the affective space of shared laughter opened possibilities for attunement (Game, 2001). The slipperiness of that laughter (for we could never be sure we were laughing at, with, or past one another) is what made it so effective; the laughter often functioned to fill the space left by the question we each implicitly were asking. A coworker opened the back door one day to hear a well-known client laughing loudly as she came down the back alley toward the house. This client is renowned for her powerful cackle; laughter echoes up and down the alley and fills the room, heralding her arrival. Upon entering the house on this particular day, however, she did not make it halfway up the stairs before dissolving into tears, leaning heavily into my coworkers' arms for support. A bit taken aback by the abrupt mood shift she asked, “What happened? When I opened the door, you were laughing and so full of life!” She responded, “Yes, it's what keeps me safe out there. The laughter hides my pain and makes me tough. I'm here and safe, so I can let myself feel it now.” Here, the way pride and shame fold in and out of one another as the threshold into the house is crossed (out of ‘public’ and into a space considered ‘home’ for some) becomes particularly explicit. Laughter literally and metaphorically inflates her body and self, acting as a protective barrier. It acts as a manifestation of the pride required for street life, even if defensive or strategic. The force of laughter enacted pride, transforming her body into an entity that takes up space and has secure boundaries, and keeping feeling (fear, exhaustion, rage, grief, pain) at bay. Such strategies may be key to life on the street, which requires careful assertions of pride as a barrier holding back feelings that may indicate powerlessness. Upon coming inside the door, the cessation of laughter caused the affective levy that laughter had been securing to break. Articulating the dynamic relationship between inside and outside, Deleuze says that, “the outside is not a fixed limit but a moving matter animated by peristaltic movements, folds and foldings that together make up an inside” (1988: 96e97). That Deleuze evokes peristalsis and digestion is not unintentional; he references bodily processes as exemplary of the movement of folding to describe the embodied negotiations between inside and outside, absorption and repulsion, a body-subject perpetually undergoes (Deleuze, 1988). Food and drink, consciousness, spatial negotiations, encounters with ideas, feelings, other human and non-human animals, are material affective encounters with our environments that involve negotiating foldings both above and below conscious perception (Deleuze, 1978). When the client used her laughter to ignite pride and hold a provisional bodily boundary, she strategically constituted her interiority in relation to what was ‘outside’ at that moment. Upon entering the house she could let go of the proud shield laughter's movement had been securing and shift the form of her interiority through a cathartic expulsion of affect that was relatively ‘safe’ in that moment. To be sure, this ‘break’ was temporary for by the time she had settled into the space

mere minutes later the echoes of her cackles were reverberating through the walls once again. Inside the space, the multiplicity of her laughter is re-enacted in relation to the hierarchies and collective dynamics of the house. In the following section, the relationship between laughter, pride, and collective foldings will be explored. 3.2. Laughter and the collective fold In the house, laughter's contagion is heightened e people often chuckle along with laughter in a different room, or literally move to the laughter. In a space where pride might be expected to be generally lacking, a large part of why people continually return to the space day after day, year after year, is to get a ‘fix’ from a collective hive to which one feels they belong. When asked about the relationship between individual and collective pride, Jane, the longtime manager of the house stated: I think it is kind of like bees, you know, we're attracted to the hive so to speak, but we have to be feeling some part of that to go at all … to do it with other people helps to feel part of that pride and to take some of that juiciness away. What makes the house rare is its non-prescriptive nature: it has few basic rules and conditions of entrance, and all affiliations with social programs (legal services, therapy, rehab, etc.) are voluntary. That a space made necessary by multiple intersecting oppressions and thus heavy with those histories in the bodies that move through it - bodies whose day to day experiences are largely but not wholly conditioned by buttressing structures of inequality - is so often filled with laughter is politically and ethically significant to understanding the inextricability of embodiment, politics, and suffering. Since spaces such as this may be imagined as devoid of laughter and pride, the laughter in the space challenges dominant imaginings of spaces occupied by the most vulnerable.4 Further, in our current political climate, grasping how vulnerability does not foreclose the capacity to persist, resist, and find levity, is a crucial resource for social justice struggles. At its best the house is a communal space to share food, dirty jokes, perfume, scars, clothes, war stories and warnings; a place where one can break, reach out, regroup, fill up, clean up, and keep moving. Seeking to bring some of the implicit affective intensities related to pride and bodies to the surface, I created a space in the washroom at the house where the women could share their ideas about pride. What transpired on the poster temporarily leaked into the space, speaking to the relationships between laughter, pride, and survival. While responses began slowly, a wave of people suddenly started to sign the poster and mark their unique presence in the space. The inner-city community in this city is relatively small. People are related - by blood, by friendship, by business, by street hierarchies and connections - but many go months or even years without seeing one another. On the living room at the house is a wall of photos memorializing those who have passed, and it is not unusual for conversation to revolve around stories of the faces on

4 Despite the rise of the term ‘vulnerable populations’ within Canadian federal policy and its deployment to individualize social problems, adding to the burden of responsibility put on ‘communities’ (Murray, 2004), I draw on authors such as Butler (2006), Wilson Gilmore (2007) , Spade (2009), and Ahmed (2014), who use the term ‘vulnerability’ to point to the biopolitical production of bodily vulnerability through particular structural and local contexts. While I am cognizant of the way vulnerability has been co-opted within neoliberal policy contexts, I use the term to combat such co-optation through an emphasis on the inextricability of bodily vulnerability, histories, and structures.

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the wall. In contradistinction to the wall of those lost, the unprompted signing of the poster sparked a conversation that was not explicitly about pride, but spoke to the crucial intersubjective realities of pride, being, and community. It also exposed the inherent relationality of pride - it is most often expressed in response to something or someone rather than in isolation, which explains the sudden flood of responses. Pride is dynamic and moves through spaces with chameleon like adaptability, blending into or asserting itself as standing out of the crowd as needed or desired. The poster made the traces and flows of bodies and intensities moving through the space material. Although the responses on the poster exceeded the prompts, they exposed the relationship between pride and (taking up or filling) space. That is, writing on the wall appeared to become an act of pride and at the same time an opening for social connection; putting marker to paper in this case became a way to carve a literal trace into the space and to claim one's persisting existence. The (unprompted) signing of the poster, identifying their thoughts, allegiances, and relationships, provoked conversations and shared laughter that spilled outside of the confined, anonymous space of the washroom. The posters were placed in the washrooms to ensure a certain level of privacy and anonymity, however, as the poster filled it became more interactive as participants began responding to one another, sharing personal details about their lives or worldviews, what was expressed on the poster began to become more public. The narrow hallway itself, in addition to the forced interactions of comings and goings into the single toilet in the space, played an important role in keeping the poster conversation moving. At times people came out of the washroom pointing to what they had added to the conversation or to something they had just read. A common response to what one was ‘proud to be’ included familial categories such as “mother” and “sister”, lending weight to the way pride emerges in relation to dominant political categories (race, class, ability, gender, sexuality, faith, ethnicity) and the identities that proliferate from such categories (mother, academic, athlete, feminist, gimp, atheist, working class). Being a proud mother is given meaning in a social world where motherhood is valued and recognized as an appropriate or natural source of pride, and where proud motherhood can be taken up as a political response to the devaluation of mothers. The specificities of pride - how, if and why it is felt, as well as the extent to which it can be expressed in a particular time and space - are determined by the multiple collectives to which one is part. . The responses that provoked the liveliest conversations were those that referred specifically to street life, particularly by participants who were respected and/or feared in the space due to street hierarchies. These references to life on the street are incredibly significant in that they clearly articulate the connection between survival and pride. What is equally significant is what did not emerge on the poster, namely, reference to sex work. In contrast to the bold pride attached to the marginalized position of surviving on the street, the fact that every woman in that space is currently or has been involved with sex work as a means to survive was entirely absent. Street life was equated with traditionally valorized masculine traits such as toughness, violence, and ownership, while the feminized category of sex work that defines the space was rendered invisible. In one instance in particular the sociality of laughter as it relates to pride and collective hierarchies emerged. A woman came out of the bathroom laughing at a response on the wall that said, “I love being a hustler” which prompted a hearty shared laughter between herself and the woman who had been waiting in line. That the only (peripheral) reference to sex work on the poster was through the position of ‘hustler’ e a masculinized position of turning out, controlling, or ‘pimping’ out women for money e speaks to the

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sexual and gender hierarchies that implicitly mark the space. Of course, the self-proclaimed ‘hustler’ here is also severely marginalized, negotiating and taking up female masculine power as a survival mechanism. The queerness of the moment cannot be understated; the slipperiness of the term hustler e as a synonym for pimp as well as a male prostitute - further adds to the oblique nature of the women's shared laughter at a claim to ‘hustler pride’ in a feminized space of survival sex work. Even so, the affective uncertainty of such shared laughter is at once eased and heightened when collective identity and issues of belonging are at stake. In the house, where mostly white women are employed to work within poor, predominantly racialized, mostly indigenous communities, laughter is constantly used to test, establish, and reestablish hierarchies and in-group/out-group boundaries. Incoming staff members are teased (if they are lucky, because teasing in itself signals an opening) about everything from their skin colour, voice, style of dress, to their sexuality. These moments of jest are highly intensive, where laughter is used as the mechanism through which the negotiation of enfolding occurs. As the target of the joke, one has a series of choices ranging from laughing 'with' (which requires, at the very least, a strategic relinquishing of the proud self, a giving in and giving up to the rules of the space), to rejecting the invitation posed by the jest, staying rooted in the self, perhaps becoming hurt or defensive, thereby maintaining an one's status as outsider. These moments are ongoing, and obviously vary depending on the nature of the joke, the vibe of the space at that time, and the subjects involved in the encounter. What remains constant is that these encounters, where laughter is the medium of the boundary test, are simultaneously about pride and deeply political. Laughter exposes the dynamic relationship between individual and collective pride. An implicit question asked by collectives is what one is willing to give up in order to become part of the group. Laughing regardless of understanding the joke is a plea that signals the desire to enter the group fold. If the joke is only funny if you “get it,” then laughing along is a requirement to establish yourself as part of the group. We have all likely experienced feeling ‘outside’ of the joke (and thus the group), demonstrating inside jokes as an incredibly powerful tool of inclusion and exclusion that work to continually remake and reinforce (or destabilize and challenge) the boundaries of collectives. Not laughing sets one apart, outside, as the one who does not share the moment. Alternately, not ‘getting’ the joke and refusing the laughter can also be a marker of power and authority; the seriousness that accompanies authority can neutralize the force of the laughter (e.g. the teacher quieting students' giggles, the stifling of laughter when the supervisor enters the room). Importantly, the laughter in the house is not a test of identity (are you 'like' us), as much as it is a test of humility (can you be 'with' us). An emphasis on collectives forged through humble connections can undo the dominance of a politics based on individual identity and instead foster a sort of pride politics one 'identifies into' (Davis, 1997). In the final section I explore how laughter and pride in the house cannot be unmoored from processes of structural inclusion and exclusion when understood in relation to sex worker identity, dominant norms, and the political organization of bodies. 3.3. Laughter and structural foldings During a busy lunch the client phone rings. Someone quickly snatches the phone and says in a self-assured and sarcastic tone, “[the] house … You beat ‘em, we feed ‘em!” A shockwave of gasps and giggles fires throughout the room. The stark reality of the joke seemed to bring to the surface a truth that was jarringly accurate, contributing to the hilarity. The spontaneous eruption of laughter

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in the house is at times unsettling, or what some would deem ‘inappropriate’. It is often noted by staff and clients alike (and I have no doubt this is common to spaces that absorb trauma on a routine basis) that ‘we laugh so we don't cry.’ Perhaps the dark humour e laughing at the twisted realities of the world we live in - is a way to both absorb and reject those realities while not sinking into despair and hopelessness. The laughter expels a portion of the intensity that builds up in the body after compounded traumatic encounters and encounters with those whose lives are deemed hopeless; it is one method of warding off the constitutive effects of vicarious trauma in order to keep moving, keep surviving in a context where some bodies are being left to die. Eruptions of laughter can override our rational choice making capacities and “out” us in social spaces, exposing our disdain for authority, our complicity with structures of oppression, or our previously unspoken alliances and orientations. It exceeds rationality by the very nature of its contagion: waves of giggles, snickers, chuckles and belly laughs ripple across a space affecting bodies into action and reaction, creating viral laughter that increases exponentially as it zips through bodies. At the same time, laughter can trigger deep insecurity, anger, or violent defensiveness. This is especially the case for groups in positions of social or political power who are not used to being the butt of the joke. A study on the ‘culture of honor’ in the southern United States showed that, as indicated by their “markedly greater outputs of cortisol and testosterone” the bodily responses of white men in the southern U.S. are structured to respond to insults with more rage and violence than white men in the northern states (Nisbett and Cohen, 1996: 44e45). At the level of political physiology (Protevi, 2009), that is, the ways bodies are organized through complex political histories and events, the bodily capacities, triggers and thresholds of some social groups are more (or less) likely to move through the world with pride. Put another way: history has shaped the bodies of certain marginalized groups to endure violence, and shaped some bodies to react with brutality rather than avoid it. These bodily patterns and triggers become entrenched over time in relation to shifting meanings attached to dominant political categories (race, class, gender, sexuality). When norms surrounding these categories are violated, and groups in power become threatened rather than threatening, violence can erupt. Dominant societal norms position certain groups, sex workers among them (especially those who struggle with addiction, homelessness, or are not white or cis-gendered) as more or less ‘open season’ to jokes, ridicule, bullying, and harassment, while the same treatment of other groups is generally viewed as distasteful and/or overtly political (white people, especially older white men, the elderly, children, medical, legal and business professionals). Myths about sex workers as linked to the transmission of disease, as perpetual victims, and as uncivilized persist (Corbin, 1990). These myths are perpetuated by the media and have been linked to strategies enacted by the state, law, and community to keep sex workers confined to particular spaces (Hubbard and Sanders, 2003; O'Neill et al., 2008). The pride of social groups that adhere to dominant norms at the intersections of race, class, gender, embodiment, ability is generally unquestioned, thus shielding them from disciplinary, mocking laughter. The public mocking of marginalized groups (racialized Others, immigrants, poor people, feminists, disabled people, mentally ill people, etc.) e is not innocent, but a form of discursive violence that functions to discipline those for whom pride is structurally inaccessible into the norm (Willet et al., 2012). Moreover, this laughter functions to reinforce the unequal distribution of pride according to social hierarchies. These practices and techniques of normalization, of which laughter is a part, “hold us in check as administered subjects through modes of discourse and knowledge that mold the mind as well as the

body” (ibid, 230). Representations intended to evoke laughter at the expense of marginalized groups (especially Native women in a Canadian context, who are often conflated with sex workers) subtlety work to maintain oppressive structures that reproduce and rely on the criminalization and stigmatization of non-normative experiences. In a context where the target of the disciplinary apparatus in modern society is abnormality (McWhorter, 2009: 34), sex workers are positioned at the intersection of several ‘abnormal’ identities that politically structure their bodily triggers and capacities in particular ways, as well as the bodies of those who come into contact with them, physically or discursively. The ways that bodies are organized according to political categories and dominant norms structure individual affective and emotional encounters with difference, which again depend on individual experiential histories and micropolitical contexts (Connolly, 2002; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Protevi, 2009). Compared to most social groups, sex workers face routine harassment and mocking. Women who transgress the sexual mores of white hegemonic femininity have, historically, been publicly mocked and ridiculed (Finney, 1994). Within popular culture, jokes about sex workers being dirty and disease ridden, being immoral thieves immune to violence, unlike ‘respectable’ women, have become relatively non-controversial comedy staples. The social acceptance of sex workers as objects of laughter works to punish sex workers for existing outside of the dominant fold of (white, heterosexual, cis, able-bodied) respectability, and a disciplinary mechanism for those not involved in sex work. Cruel laughter must be understood as structurally produced political violence at the level of affect, and part of the intensive processes that condition possibilities for actual, physical, institutional violence. It plays a role in training the affective triggers and capacities of bodies, including sex workers themselves, to endure, accept, and leave unquestioned the ongoing violence against them. In Terrorist Assemblages (2007) Jasbir Puar uses the fold to think through the biopolitical management of life in a post-9/11 context. Puar's concept of homonationalism points to the historical and geopolitical contingencies that enable some queer lives to be enfolded, benevolently welcomed, and urged into the dominant, national body at the expense of the social and literal deaths of (O) ther, sexually and racially perverse queers. What Puar's work clearly articulates is the strategic function of structural folding and contemporary biopolitics. Being “folded into life” requires adherence to and support of “ever-narrowing parameters of white racial privilege, consumption capabilities, gender and kinship normatively, and bodily integrity” (ibid, xii). Foldings necessarily and crucially involve ongoing, power-laden, affective processes of differentiation in order to carefully structure interiorities, individual, collective, and at the level of the wider body politic. 4. Conclusion In this article I used the affective politics of laughter as a lens to rethink the political potentiality of pride. Through an emphasis on the affective component of Deleuze's concept of the fold in relation to the constitution of individual, collective, and structural bodies, I argued that the multiplicity of laughter's foldings in the house undoes dominant understandings of pride. Attentiveness to the deep sociality of collective laughter in relation to the everyday geographies of pride in the house offers humble reminders and important insights into the importance of affective politics to social justice struggles that must center experiences of the most vulnerable. Enacting an affective and ethical attentiveness to laughter and pride in this space requires a radical rethinking of what proud feelings can do politically, as well as a recognition that dominant understandings of pride and do not currently have the capacity to

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