The Queer Art of Failure is an immediately engaging and productive work of literary theory by Jack (Judith) Halberstam—I’m surprised it was never required reading in my theory courses throughout University or my Master’s. The introduction to the book does an excellent job of outlining a kind of queer epistemology and its relevance to theory and society. The thesis of the work is essentially that what we often perceive as “failure” runs against a heteronormative and hegemonic standard, offering a viable alternative for the production of knowledge and societal configurations. The introduction hints at and then explicitly mentions Samuel Beckett’s phrase from Worstward Ho!: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Ironically, people often adopt Beckett’s phrase as a kind of motivational poster mentality: we’ll fail less dramatically next time and teleologically get better. We’ll fail, but get closer to success. This is a misreading. The real goal is to fail, to escape the standards that have such deep control over our lives and, which Halberstam shows, reproduce heteronormative biases across society.
To justify the thesis, Halberstam draws on “low theory” and the “silly archive,” texts that we generally would not accept in an academic setting. For instance, Halberstam spends a great deal of time addressing Pixar films like Wall-E and Finding Nemo, other animated films like Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit films, and even Dude, Where’s My Car?. It makes the analysis simultaneously subversive and accessible. As much as we could bring in esoteric theorists like Jacques Derrida or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (and indeed Halberstam does), the film commentary offers concrete examples to illustrate key concepts in Halberstam’s work.
There is some interesting metacommentary on film production and why Pixar lends itself to stories of subversion. For instance, Halberstam reads Chicken Run as a kind of Marxist parable that presents a feminist utopia where the chickens take control of their own lives and resist the exploitative systems of the farmers. When it comes to animation, though, the most compelling piece of analysis to me was Halberstam’s reading of Finding Nemo, a film that I have seen approximately zero point seven five times, but know the broad strokes of. Halberstam takes particular care to address the character Dory and her inability to remember details. In that failure of memory, Halberstam notes all kinds of possibilities for new, queer arrangements for being. He makes special note that in the story, Nemo has lost his mother. His father takes on a motherly role in trying to find him and Dory serves as a companion—but not a replacement mother. Nonetheless, they become an alternative kind of family wherein Dory is specifically not a romantic interest. Because she can’t remember how things are supposed to be, new social arrangements are able to emerge.
Halberstam continues the discussion of memory in the “classic” (?) film Dude, Where’s My Car? wherein Ashton Kutcher and Sean William Scott can’t remember much about the previous night—indeed, they are caught in a cycle of forgetting. One of the results is that they seem to have escaped what is so ingrained in our society—their failure to remember social norms leads to them engaging in a kiss-off competition against Fabio, which Halberstam celebrates for the unabashed open-mouthed kissing of two men on screen, a kind of queer relationship that emerges between the central characters. Of course it’s all not hugs and kisses; Halberstam also addresses the racism of the central characters (but notes that the characters written as Asian stereotypes are also the sources of knowledge and clarification for the man-children).
The point is, though, that there’s a strategic forgetting—a failure of memory—that is a prerequisite for abandoning normative modes of being. Halberstam comments on the way that the 2SLGBTQ+ community sometimes takes on the wrong tactics for advancing their causes by trying to appeal to the normative modes of being. For example, he refers to the way that the fight for marriage rights was somewhat misguided. Essentially, queer people were fighting for access to a normative familial arrangement rather than the more promising option of reimagining what families actually are. Families might be fostered around non-romantic relationships, for example, or have multiple people involved romantically, or a more fluid configuration than is implied by heteronormative marriages. Halberstam suggests that the queer cause to be seen as “normal” is less promising than accepting that queer relationships are different from heteronormative ones and leaning into the genuine alternatives that emerge.
I particularly appreciated the way the theory applies to academia. Rather than conforming to the modes that have existed for ages, Halberstam proposes a different method for engaging in analysis than the paranoiac reading practices established by the likes of Foucault, Zizek, and so on. Part of the practice, as I mentioned, involves a reliance on the “silly archive” and on “low theory.” Halberstam also engages in “surface reading,” offering a great deal of plot summary and offering commentary on the plot alone. Rather than diving into the weeds of particular word choices or examining connotations “against the grain” that nobody would ever think of, Halberstam’s approach is comprehensible and accessible while still finding a different angle for examination. He finds the generative possibilities of queer narratives and in queering narratives.
If I have a complaint about the book, it’s his chapter on Nazism. I can understand why it’s included in the book—more on that momentarily—but the commentary was less incisive than that which would truly grip me. He explores the not insignificant relationship between Nazism and homosexuality, but ultimately it was not the most useful or applicable section of the work. It serves as an example of the nonlinearity of queer history. When people try to present queer history as a completely teleological, increasingly positive narrative of success, it actually devalues the reality of queer existence while simultaneously trying to make it conform to heteronormative visions of success.
In Halberstam’s words, queerness is often seen as a “dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness.” While he notes that “nothing essentially connects gay and lesbian and trans people to these forms of unbeing and unbecoming, [...] the social and symbolic system that tether queerness to loss and failure cannot be washed away. Some would say: nor should they be.” In setting up this negativity, Halberstam notes that “to simply repudiate the connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer.” It’s a refreshing and authentic revision to how we typically think about queer life. We tend to, in pop-culture in particular, reduce the uniqueness of queer life and present it in heteronormative codes. Rather than erasing the difference, Halberstam commits to acknowledging that by the standards of heteronormativity, queerness is failure—and when it strives not to be, it ends up replicating erroneous stereotypes. Halberstam mentions “the perky depictions of lesbians in The L Word or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good looking arbiters of taste.” Instead, Halberstam dwells in “darkness [as…] an interpretive strategy.”
Halberstam draws from animation, photography, film, and historical phenomena to present a more authentic, that is, fraught, story of queerness. I also appreciate that Halberstam points to some central differences between feminist theory and queer theory, as I often have a difficult time articulating it to my students. Halberstam discusses “Can the Subaltern Speak?” by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, most likely the most important essay I’ve read in my life, and talks about searching for a kind of feminism that allows others to speak, a flexible epistemic project. He wants to reject rigidified feminism and know “how not to sacrifice the other on behalf of his or her own sovereignty” with the goal of engaging in “a feminism that fails to save others or to replicate itself. A feminism that finds purpose in its own failure.” The vision of success as teleological progression is presented as a product of patriarchy, one that is often replicated by rigidifying identity. Halberstam discusses how feminism can hold a younger generation of women—especially women of colour—at bay. He discusses how the model of passing knowledge in women’s studies is often “from mother to daughter” in a “white, gendered, heteronormative” mode. “Mothers” get frustrated in trying to make the daughters understand and the daughters “struggle to make the older women see that regulatory systems are embedded in the paradigms they so want to pass on.” It becomes patriarchal in that the mother is placed in the position of being history, memory, tradition and the daughter becomes inheritor of a static system “which she must either accept without changing or reject completely.”
It seems to me that Halberstam successfully carves out a “third space,” willingly eschewing convention in order to produce a different model for thinking and being. I really appreciated a clear elucidation of the methodology of the book in the introduction and the case studies of Pixar films, simultaneously reading with and against the grain in a generative way. Seeing the methodology at work is a great example for reading—a model I hope to show my students to give them yet another way of reading, a way of opening possibilities for themselves and others without replicating hegemonic logics.
And on that note—happy reading. I hope you fail at it. Productively, of course.
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