The queer art of failure

Some parts: Halberstam, J. (2013). The queer art of failure. (Queer art of failure.) Durham. NC: Duke University Press, pp 1-5 & 23-25 & 87-120

p. 3

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright- sided: positive thinking is a North American affliction, “a mass delusion” that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions (2009: 13); that success depends only upon working hard and failure is always of your own doing (8).

p. 4

From the perspective of feminism, failure has often been a better bet than success. Where feminine success is always measured by male standards, and gender failure often means being relieved of the pressure to measure up to patriarchal ideals, not succeeding at womanhood can offer unexpected pleasures […] Shadow feminisms take the form not of becoming, being, and doing but of shady, murky modes of undoing, unbecoming, and violating.

p. 5

Case Little miss Sunshine: the perspective of the loser in a world that is interested only in winners

p. 88

The concept of “weapons of the weak” (James C. Scott) can be used to recategorize what looks like inaction, passivity, and lack of resistance in terms of the practice of stalling the business of the dominant. We can also recognize failure as a way of refusing to acquiesce to dominant logics of power and discipline and as a form of critique. As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities.

p. 96

The Queer Art of Failure Gender trouble of the butch variety is very often at the very heart of queer failure. But the queer legend Quentin Crisp transforms the apparent pathos of the gender queer into an asset: “If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style” (1968: 196). In this witty refusal of the dogged Protestant work ethic Crisp makes the crucial link between failure and style and, in his own effeminate persona, embodies that link as gender trouble, gender deviance, gender variance. For Crisp, failure as a style also involves his “career” as a “naked civil servant,” someone who chooses not to work and someone for whom work cannot be life’s fulfillment […] This particular ethos of resignation to failure, to lack of progress and a particular form of darkness, a negativity really (which I discuss in later chapters), can be called a queer aesthetic.