Here’s part two of my notes on Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure for my Queering Theory class: (here’s part one)
chapter three: The Queer Art of Failure
failure goes hand in hand with capitalism
history of pessimism is a tale of:
- anti-capitalist queer struggle
- anti-colonial struggle
- refusal of legibility
- art of unbecoming
impossible improbable unlikely unremarkable
weapons of the weak: STALLING recategorize what looks like inaction, passivity, lack of resistance (88)
Trainspotting and unqueer failure: failure leads to while male rage directed against women/people of color
OUTLINE OF REST OF CH: An examination of what happens when failure is productively linked to racial awareness, anticolonial struggle, gender variance, and different formulations of the temporality of success (92).
- Moffat and 4th Place: The Art of Losing
- The L Word, the Anti-Aesthetic of the Lesbian, and the butch lesbian as loser/failure
- Darkness, Shadows, Failure-as-style, Limits, Hopelessness, Punk politics, Fucking shit up, and the Queer Art of Failure
- Children, Queer Fairy Tales, Shrek/Babe/Chicken Run/Finding Nemo, and Bringing down the winner and discovering our inner dweeb
one: Darkness and a Queer This by Scott on The Queer Art of Failure
two: Punk Politics: God Save the Queen, The Sex Pistols
A rallying cry of England’s dispossessed?
A snarling rejection of the tradition of the monarchy and national investment in it?
No future for Edelman…seems to mean (too) much about Lacan…and not enough about the powerful negativity of punk politics (108).
Negativity may be anti-politics, but it should not register as a-political.
three: Halberstam, expanding of the archive of negative affects and “fucking shit-up”
four: A queer archive? Inspired by JH’s call to discover our inner dweeb…
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…” (121).