The Queer Art of Failure
by Judith Halberstam
Duke University Press. 224 pages, $22.95
FOR THOSE who are skeptical of a gay rights movement that aspires only to enable GLBT individuals to join the cultural mainstream, this book will seem as refreshing as water in a desert. Judith Halberstam looks at a variety of media to find “queer” subtexts that undermine a mainstream conception of personal success as based on heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and the accumulation of property.
The author has written and taught widely on gender formation in a cultural context. She’s well aware of the privileges of being, or at least appearing to be, masculine, heterosexual, and affluent, and the general perception that all others have “dropped out” of adult life, or have failed to acquire certain essential skills. Halberstam states her case: “The Queer Art of Failure dismantles the logics of success and failure with which we currently live.
Halberstam’s definition of “failure” is problematical, since (as she explains) in most of the examples she provides, what society takes as failure looks more attractive than conformist “success.” Her argument is ambitious and wide-ranging—and not equally persuasive in every chapter. She critiques the standardized “knowledge” that’s disseminated in universities as serving the cultural status quo and proposes that sometimes forgetting or losing knowledge can lead to new ways of thinking. She supports this point about cultural amnesia with reference to three examples from popular culture, arguing that the forgetfulness of the central characters in the movies Dude, Where’s My Car?, Finding Nemo, and Fifty First Dates acts as a plot device that leads to new developments.
The author’s suggestion that her interdisciplinary approach to “queer failure” should or will be embraced outside the Ivory Tower seems to this reviewer to be the weakest plank in her platform. Like other academics who point out the limitations of the academy, she seems to be trying to move the earth while still standing on it. In fact, she encourages other academics to be “in the university but not of it,” but does not explain how this can be done. Part of her argument looks like a necessary debunking of certain “gay rights” clichés. In a section on “queerness” and fascism, she critiques the modern assumption of an unbroken history of prominent “queers” as advocates of a liberal agenda of individual, and especially sexual, freedom for all. She disentangles homophobia from macho contempt for femininity (associated in Nazi ideology with heterosexual women, Jewish men, and homosexual men) in order to show how some “queer,” masculine men and women could admire and support totalitarian regimes.
Before the Stonewall Riots, “queers” lurked in the cultural shadows, and Halberstam finds that environment to be fruitful and even revolutionary. This book is guaranteed to be controversial. It would make a good basis for discussion after seeing one of the movies, performances, or bodies of visual pieces that are analyzed in its pages.
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Jean Roberta is a writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan.
