Read an Excerpt from “Joy to the World: The Performance of Collective Pleasure” by Gary Alan Fine
There are innumerable ways to take pleasure in life: a bite of cake in the late afternoon, a walk in the warm springtime air after a long winter, a listen to the opening chords of your favorite song. But each of these pleasures is transformed by the presence of others. In Joy to the World, sociologist Gary Alan Fine takes up one of the major themes of his lifetime of work: pleasure. Fine gives us the conceptual basis for a sociology of pleasure: a joyous view of the world that, at times, inspires us, through expectations of interaction, shared cultures, and routine practices that make life worth living in community.
To find pleasure, people look for their friends in regular gathering places. In the following excerpt from chapter two, Fine explores the pleasures of togetherness by examining the three categories of gathering spots: the corner, the club, and the circle.
Chapter 2: Hanging Out on the Corner
As Woody Allen has been credited with saying, “Just showing up is half the battle.” Knowing where to be is the other half. Much of the delight of childhood results from the mere act of hanging out with chums: a shared “being with.” Adults, with busier schedules, share this pleasure when possible. But at all ages, togetherness can be ecstatic as participants strive to make “the scene”: an intersection of the affordances of time and place. To find pleasure, people look for their friends in regular gathering places. Seeking and gathering form the basis of casual friendship.
These spaces of casual contact, labeled “third places” (Oldenburg 1989) or “hangouts” (Leary 1983), constitute sites of group culture apart from home and work. They provide the pleasure of others: not just being but talking and doing. The display or sharing of objects—cigarettes, joints, cigars, alcohol, or distinctive clothing—provides a potent indication of belonging.
To explore the pleasures of togetherness, I examine three broad categories of gathering spots: the corner, the club, and the circle. There is no definite limit on the size of these gatherings—some can be quite large—but they are places where acquaintances meet and where they expect to meet. These are scenes in which individuals need not remain long, but while the individual is present, these gatherings allow for comforting practices that reveal meaningful copresence. Although not all informal gatherings are satisfying— urban nighttime shootings are a dystopian reality—people typically treasure their time together.
We must avoid treating social life as utopia. In each site, people can be excluded because of their background, skills, or persona. Further, a long- standing member can, in effect, blackball a potential recruit. A novice judged unworthy or annoying can be ghosted or rejected. Even if a group is ostensibly open, those with less talent (e.g., a poor surfer, chess player, singer, or camper) or with “wrong values” can discover that they are ignored, a problem evident among schoolchildren who have yet to learn the virtues of politesse (Sherif et al. 1961; Corsaro and Everitt 2024). Unskilled performers, however defined, can be rejected informally, while still ostensibly being members.1 Such exclusion, while found everywhere, is most evident in clubs and circles.
Friendships are not simply for the moment but can last, revealing the pleasures of liking and linking and providing a deep well of shared narrative. Even if a group is small, its collective memory may be large. The danger is that intense dyadic friendships can curtail broader allegiance, overwhelming affiliation with the group. Sociologist Mikaela Sundberg (2019) found through her research that in Cistercian monasteries, friendships actually threaten fraternal life. But whether dyadic or communal, friendship ties can bolster an individual’s sense of worth. Lacking such connections, people often feel isolated. As they evolve over time, gatherings establish a chronology of friendship.
Psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1953) powerfully emphasized the value of group support. Sullivan recognized the importance of a child having a set of chums who provide moral backing. For Sullivan, these were peers (boys, in his case) with whom a youngster spent time, providing role models who socialized the child into a broader community, engaging with others who provided guidance, direction, and encouragement. The reality that some groups support the larger norms of adult society and others are hostile suggests why parents believe that having the “right” set of friends is crucial in producing a properly socialized child. Friends encourage comrades to travel on paths that might not otherwise have been taken.
In this chapter, I present research depicting three social forms that draw participants and build relationships: the corner; the club; and the circle. Each represents places and occasions that are appealing for the companionship provided. Together they emphasize the impact of face-to-face gatherings. Although I limit my discussion to sites of face-to-face copresence, other research projects investigate the “corners” of the internet: websites, apps, and discussion boards where people meet friendly avatars and extend their cybernetworks. Pleasure can be had in online communities, even if establishing relationships in cyberspace is complicated (boyd 2014).
To appreciate the art of “hanging out” on corners, in clubs, and with circles, I draw on three concepts that reveal the distinctive forms of these gatherings: scenes, statuses, and interests. While these forms overlap, the corner is a scene, the club marks status, and the circle builds a community of interest.
Scenes reflect the immediacy of life on the corner, whether literally at an intersection or metaphorically in a park, mall, plaza, playground, or apartment. These places welcome groups that gather at the moment and then dissipate without formal closure. Some corner clusters may be known for regular routines (e.g., people often visit dog parks at certain times), but nothing is demanded other than by the choice of the participant. Fluidity, less evident elsewhere, characterizes the corner.
The second social form, which I have labeled clubs, has a recognizable structure that supports the gathering. Having been granted a recognized status, whether formally designated or implicit, permits participation. This status might include class, race, gender, ethnicity, age, or gender identity. Fraternal organizations serve as a case in point, but so do bars, coffeehouses, salons, cafés, or even sites of cruising (Best 2005, 164), in which collective identities are displayed. Such locales are often known for the type of person who fits most easily, although rules may evolve.2 The formal club in which membership is awarded through collective and rigorous judgment is a purer, if less common, example of a bounded scene, distinct from a public third place.
The third social form consists of collaborative circles in which participants with specialized interests convene to discuss matters of collective concern. These, too, are scenes in which status matters (Parker and Hackett 2012). But circles, as defined here, recruit participants with recognizable claims of expertise, often academic, intellectual, or cultural. These circles have been labeled cenacles. Jesus and his followers at the Last Supper constitute a well-known example in which the disciples understood what mattered, given their commitment to their master’s teaching. Admittedly, the three types of gatherings overlap as clubs have features of circles with common interests: corners, like clubs, may be open only to those judged worthy; and corners, like circles, may be known for the pursuits of attendees. But, in important ways, the division makes sense: the casual corner gathering, the admission to a club, and the collaboration of a circle.
Excerpted from Joy to the World by Gary Alan Fine, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Gary Alan Fine is a visiting scholar at Emory University in Atlanta and the James E. Johnson Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University. He is the author of Fair Share: Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance, also published by the University of Chicago Press.
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