Book Thoughts: The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
In exercising my attempt to teach myself to give up on things I'm not feeling rather than doggedly pursuing a completionist attitude, here is me not finishing this book, or as people seem to say even in person, DNFing (like it's a verb or something).
I got like about halfway through before I just decided this ain't for me. I think fundamentally my problem with this book is that I believe more in "constructive politics" (as defined by Elite Capture by Taiwo) so it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of perpetual failure through anti-sociality as any type of way of politics that will actually lead to better outcomes for more of the population. Any individual can be anti-social if they want. They can buck society and politics and not perform and eschew love and family and whatever they want. But if everyone were like this, this would not improve the basic facts on the ground: Can we get everyone access to healthcare, housing, and food? There is nothing more in the world in terms of morality that I care more about than this, or what I could perhaps call "limiting unnecessary suffering."
In short, I believe in building things. Call that my positivist bias.
My other issue that I just have with Queer theory in general is that the word "Queer" itself basically comes to mean "anything that doesn't fit in perfectly with hegemonic patriarchy," which just doesn't really make sense to me because it feels like it has the habit of flattening degrees of things. Like a cishet woman refusing to marry a man because she's against marriage can be seen as a queer move under this type of description, but it's really nothing on the same level as a trans person who is trying to openly live out.
Notice also that this book is titled "Queer Art of Failure" rather than "Art of Queer Failure," and that's because failure in this book is inherently queer, see previous paragraph. So in this case refusing to ever hold down a job would indeed be a "queer act." Something in my brain just can't help asking, isn't there a better term we could be using for this???
Granted, all levels of resistance to hegemonic patriarchy should count for something, and it is true that cishet patriarchy structures everything we do and undergirds white supremacy & capitalism, etc., etc. But like any theorizing device, a term only really speaks to a group of things we think are more statistically likely to be explained by our invented term. And that's the problem, here, I guess, is that I cannot understand what statistically falls under "Queer" when it is expanded as it is in Queer studies. But I'm not out here trying to argue that it should only be used on the individual level or whatever since I think theorizing at the level of making individuals cite their identities first just leads to endless discourse loops where people get preoccupied with who fits the in-group rather than whether we can work together to achieve real goals, such as, get everyone housing!!!!!!!!!!!! and we literally all benefit.
One of the things that really exemplifies this Queer theory thing though is that this book mentions that all children by default are queer, because they have to be taught meticulously what "boy" and "girl" mean and who's allowed to do what actions, and they say all sorts of non-cisheterosexual things while they are unaware of the rules they are learning. There's really no age bracket on what they mean by "children," but from what I've read before, a lot of children already pick up on gender by the time they're like 4. (There's theories on how trans people are more likely to be autistic and vice versa because they aren't as affected by being taught Gender when they're kids due to lack of picking up on social cues.) And then there was a whole section about children's movies and how they exist outside of the individualism and care less about the temporality that governs adult lives and capitalism, etc. Being out of typical time flows is queer, etc. etc.
Maybe this book is useful for someone but that someone izn't me.
Below are my collection of bullet points that I'm not going to bother to flesh out with actual text snippets and whatever.
Not sure I really agree with this forgetting thing to the extent the writer takes it. Forgetting family entirely seems pretty anti-indigenous. I also don't get how you would sustain a movement without accounting for history and a story of the struggle + stuff like activism requires bonds over time. it's true that we need some forgetting to heal but i don't get how everyone forgetting would be the answer (see stuff like vaccines etc.) rather a lot of public health seems specific to not letting people forget that preventative measures work and are crucial for the health of everyone.
temporal longevity, deemphasis of family?
forgetting dominant narratives primarily? remember anticolonial narratives. this author seems white
forgetting as a new space for healing from trauma and new remembering
argues that failure needs to be thought of as queer because het failure only supports the worldview of white men
Tracy Moffatt and taking pictures of people who come in 4th at the Olympics and don't medal / dignity in losing
building around loss and failure
queerness as darkness, failure, death, finitude
talking about modes of being antisocial, yet shouldn't be apolitical. i don't find this way of thinking very helpful because i feel like it just gives into trauma lashing out
entire art / photography section i dont understandeth and i do not feel sufficiently compelled to read up on context. basically emptiness / liminal as queer
"Adults are the viewers who demand sentiment, progress, and closure; children, these films recognize, could care less." doesn't seem to map to what i wanted as a kid but sure
I guess the argument is that they feature less things adults like but I don't think it makes entire sense to claim that they are less narrative. There are some elements like missing mother = missing memory and nonstandard characters like Dory (short-term memory loss) and all of that but at the end of the day you need to also sell the tickets to the parents to compel them to go take their kids to it to begin with. So like a truly "queer" narrative -- according to this book -- of children running around, forgetting their parents and nuclear families entirely to unionize but in a way that doesn't present clear cause & effect, transing their genders and forgoing pairings, with no true progression and random failing of dominant ideas, etc., could never exist. At least not by anyone who is sincerely hoping to make a buck."our of our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner"
"empathy with the victor invaribly benefits the rulers" (Walter Benjamin)
Mahmood, Saba "the politics of piety"
anti-social feminism and respecting agency / negation rather than liberal assumptions / liberal freedom vs. death -- resistance in passivity and refusal
Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and on refusing every structure that could define one (including love, family). seeing truth as often negative, not interested in beginnings or ends. being happy confirms the colonial project
this then leads to a section about masochism.
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