A lively and thought-provoking examination of how the homogenizing tendencies of modern society might be resisted through the creative application of failure, forgetting, and passivity, actions generally deemed of little value within today's capitalist models of success. . . . [A]s a close reader of popular culture, she is exemplary, and as a valiant attempt to find value in positions and attitudes such as negativity that our modern success-oriented society disdains, this study is never less than thrilling. - Publishers Weekly Queer Theory using Spongebob Squarepants? Totally there... Underdogs and shoddy queers can take wordy, erudite solace in Halberstams words. - Gay Times [H]ere is a book well worth the time and attention it takes to read it and to consider its implications. Most especially in that Judith Halberstam writes not only with authority, but also with genuine wit, which leaves the reader laughing out loud from time to time, something quite unknown until now in books of queer theory. Further, Ms. Halberstam presents her case with deep insight into human nature, and into our deepset cultural need to simplify our definition of the word successand, up until now, our seeming need to ignore the creative implications of failure. - Vinton Rafe McCabe, New York Journal of Books All losers are the heirs of those who have lost before them. The Queer Art of Failure narrates hilarious and swerving outlaw comedies of refusal, absurdity, and exuberant being, acting in solidarity with its resident artistsfrom SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono. But the book hums a dark tone, too. The arts of normative style, playing out on sexual, racialized, gendered, and colonial bodies and landscapes, are painful to witness, even here. No artist or critic can repair the damage, erasing history, but Judith Halberstam wields all of the weapons that intelligence (and cartoons) can bring against the harsh work of conventionality.Lauren Berlant, author of Cruel Optimism The Queer Art of Failure is a manifesto for cultural studies. It self-consciously risks being dismissed or trashed in order to rescue alternative objects of analysis, methods of knowing, and ways of communicating. Its stakes are clear. Its not attempting to argue for the recovery of its materials from obscurity; it values forgetting and obsolescence. Its not claiming to retool our understanding of major work; it traffics unapologetically in the minor. And it doesnt pretend to comprehensive scholarship; it offers up plot summaries and allegorical readings with glee.Elizabeth Freeman, author of Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories The Queer Art of Failure is inspired, provocative, and hilarious. More significantly, it is a deft evisceration of the regulative rigidities of disciplinarity and the pretensions of high theory. Judith Halberstams advocacy of silly archives and low theory is much more than a carnivalesque skewering of the earnest self-seriousness of much academic scholarship; it is a populist clarion call for expansive democratic visions of what it is we are writing about and for whom we think we are writing. Lisa Duggan, author of The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy Failure abounds all around us: economies collapse, nation-states falter, and malfeasance rules. In the face of our dismal situation, Judith Halberstam distills and repurposes the negative in order to think outside the tyranny of success. The Queer Art of Failure finds a new vitality in not winning, accumulating, doing, or knowing. Both counterintuitive and anti-anticipatable, this compelling book pushes beyond many of the impasses and blockages that limit our critical horizons today.Jos Esteban Muoz, author of Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity Because Halberstam uses pop-culture examples, The Queer Art of Failure is an idea
Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, as well as Female Masculinity and Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.
Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xii Introduction: Low Theory 1 1. Animating Revolt and Revolting Animation 27 2. Dude, Where's My Phallus? Forgetting, Losing, Looping 53 3. The Queer Art of Failure 87 4. Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity 123 5. "The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You": Homosexuality and Fascism 147 6. Animating Failure: Ending, Fleeing, Surviving 173 Notes 189 Bibliography 193 Index 201