The book is organized around Lee’s 10 aesthetics of joy - pleasurable qualities that tend to cut across lines of age, gender, and ethnicity. “It’s an intense momentary experience of positive emotion, one that you really feel in your body: It makes you smile or laugh, or it gives you that feeling of wanting to jump up and down.” “Happiness is more of a broad evaluation of how we feel about our lives over time, whereas joy is much simpler and more immediate,” Lee explains.

The book draws on neuroscience, psychology, and Lee’s own excursions - including trips to a treehouse bed-and-breakfast in Washington, a hot-air-balloon festival in New Mexico, and a “reversible destiny loft” in Mitaka, Japan - to explore how we can design our surroundings to inspire more daily cheer.Ĭrucially, joy is different from happiness. That question ultimately led Lee to write Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness. “Because then, as a designer, that’s something I can replicate.

I guess I didn’t fail.”īut how could these physical artifacts evoke an emotional response? “I really wanted to understand what happens in my brain when I look at something that makes me feel joy,” she says. “I thought, Well, that’s weird,” she recalls. It was her first review in the Pratt Institute’s industrial-design program, and she’d presented an assortment of everyday objects: a lamp, a stool, a small cup. Zorbitality emerges as a resistant imaginary, where differences in sexuality cease to matter and where personal movement styles are celebrated within a set of shared rhythms.When Ingrid Fetell Lee’s academic advisors remarked that her work inspired a feeling of joy, she wasn’t quite sure what to think. Finally, I conceptualise Zumba as (i) an asexual space, (ii) a celebration of the autoerotic body and (iii) an invocation of West African collective movement rites. Secondly, I examine the emergence of Zumba Fitness as a contemporary Dionysian rite, mediated by digital culture, capitalism and globalisation, through my insights from the ZIN Academy and Believe party (London, July 2015) and work as a Zumba Fitness instructor. I firstly conceptualise Zorbitality, via Csikszentmihalyi’s theory of ‘flow’ and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’. In response, this article proposes an emergent concept for reconfiguring female (a)sexualities through collective ecstatic motion - Zorbitality - drawing on the global Latin dance fitness phenomenon, Zumba Fitness, as a central example. With the rise of a postfeminist culture, the lived experiences of asexual-identified women are in danger of being lost within static narratives of frigidity and singledom. This definition is problematic, as it assumes that everybody is sexual and that sexuality is immutable. In the 21st century, asexuality has become synonymous with sexual orientation, being described as a 'lack' of sexual attraction.

Fetell lee