The queer art of failure

by Jack Halberstam

211 pages

English language

Published Oct. 31, 2011 by Duke University Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-8223-5028-6
OCLC Number:: 700406623

(7 reviews)

"The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives—to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Judith Halberstam proposes “low theory” as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one’s way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. She pays particular attention to animated children’s films, revealing narratives filled with …

15 editions

martattack reviewed The queer art of failure by Jack Halberstam

Review of 'The queer art of failure' on 'Goodreads'

3 stars

Look...... I'm all for nonsense and abstraction but like..... A thorough analysis of "Dude, Where's My Car?" from a queer perspective, finding symbolism on forgetting as a way to disrupt vertical hegemonic patriarchal transfer of knowledge is an abstraction of nonsense I just can't get behind!

This book has some reaaaally nice commentary on failure vs success and thus the queer vs the norm and it's like a prompt for all of us to like reimagine our realities and strive for other kinds of lives that don't fit normative notions of success. Nice takes on CGI and animation media as a vessel for that, and overall interesting takes on today's world using queer "failure" as a lens. And as a way to link content and form he wants to use other types of knowledge to make a point - i.e. analyzing silly media as a form of "low theory".

I totally get it, I do love looking into media, but the 5-page analyses of "50 First Dates" and "Dude, Where's My Car?" are sooo convoluted, to a ridiculous degree!!!! To me, it all reads like a satire of postmodern academics interpreting and reinterpreting reality, getting lost in the world of ideas and grandiose lexicon.

Tbf, I think this was, at times, too academic for me - I don't read primary texts!!! I watch Youtube videos! I'm just your regular queer girlie yaknow? Maybe many things went over my head. Maybe the whole point was that this was satire! Gosh knows. In the spirit of embracing this piece, I will fully acknowledge my failure at grasping the entire meaning of this book - and that's a-okay!

To end, a really nice quote that I think pretty much summarizes the book's thesis:

"Let's leave success and its achievements to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers. The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that "empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers"."