 First edition | |
| Author | Jack Halberstam |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Duke University Press |
Publication date | 2011 |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 978-0-8223-5045-3 |
The Queer Art of Failure is a 2011 book of queer theory by Jack Halberstam. In it, Halberstam argues that failure can be a productive way of critiquing capitalism and heteronormativity. Using examples from popular culture, like Pixar animated films, Halberstam explores alternatives to individualism and conformity.
In the introduction, Halberstam proposes low theory as a way to deconstruct the normative modes of thought that have established uniform societal definitions of success and failure. Low theory is a concept Halberstam borrows from cultural theorist Stuart Hall. He uses it to undermine heteronormative definitions of success and to argue that the failure to live up to societal standards can open up more creative ways of thinking and existing in the world. Halberstam points out that queer and feminine success is always measured by male, heterosexual standards. The failure to live up to these standards, Halberstam argues, can offer unexpected pleasures such as freedom of expression and sexuality.
Halberstam clarifies his points encouraging failure in a lecture called "On Behalf of Failure": "My basic point with failure is that in a world where success is counted in relationship to profit ... or relayed through heteronormative marriage, failure is not a bad place to start for a critique of both capitalism and heteronormativity." [1] Halberstam describes low theory as a "utility of getting lost over finding our way." [2] Halberstam asks the reader how to avoid those heteronormative definitions of success and being that relegate other forms of knowing to redundancy and irrelevancy.
Halberstam provides several examples of publications, films and popular cultural artifacts in order to aid in explaining the concept of low theory. These include SpongeBob SquarePants , Monsters, Inc. , Little Miss Sunshine , and the writings of Monique Wittig and Barbara Ehrenreich among others.
In the first chapter, Halberstam shows how a certain type of animated films teaches children about revolt. Halberstam says that animated films "revel in the domain of failure," [3] and states that it is not enough for an animated film to focus on success and triumph because that is not what happens in childhood, following Kathryn Bond Stockton's "growing sideways" concept. [4] Halberstam explains that Stockton has shown how childhood is queer in nature, but that society trains children to be heterosexual. Halberstam explains that revolt and rebellion are inherent in children, and if these traits were not, then society would have no reason to train them otherwise. According to Halberstam, animated films address the disorderly child who sees the large world beyond his controlling family.
Halberstam names this subgenre of animated films "Pixarvolt", after the animation studio Pixar. Pixarvolts make subtle and obvious connections between communist revolt and queer embodiment, and get to the root of the struggle between human and non-human creatures. Halberstam argues that although Marxist scholars have dismissed queer theory as "body politics", these film successfully show "that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination." [5] Pixarvolt films are powered by revolution, transformation, and rebellion, and most Pixarvolt films deal with escape to utopian freedom. His examples include Toy Story and Chicken Run . [6]
Halberstam then writes about how humans project our world onto animals, in terms of human exceptionalism, which he defines in two ways: humans thinking they are superior to and more unique than other animals, and humans using cruel forms of anthropomorphism. Halberstam considers how committed humans are to failing structures, like marriage, and how drawing on animal behavior makes humans feel as though heterosexuality is more natural or primal. Halberstam shows how March of the Penguins , like other animal documentaries, humanizes animal life and reduces animals to human standards. The film perpetuates heterosexuality by failing to acknowledge that penguins are not monogamous or to consider that penguins are not subject to human expectations. Halberstam claims, "the long march of the penguins is proof neither of heterosexuality in nature nor of the reproductive imperative nor of intelligent design." [7]
Lastly, Halberstam talks about monstrous animations and their direct connection to the queer way of thinking. Animation creates things that are neither human nor animal. In Monsters, Inc., the corporate world relies on screams of children to power their society. This movie allows the child to stand up to their "boogeyman", and, at the same time, form an affectionate relationship with it. This bond is queer in that it lets the child control the transgression of its own boundaries.
The main difference between Halberstam's "Pixarvolt" films and regular animated movies is that other films emphasize family, human individuality, and extraordinary individuals, while Pixarvolt films focus more on collectivity, social bonding, and diverse communities, showing the importance of recognizing strangeness of bodies, sexuality and gender. "Two thematics can transform a potential Pixarvolt film into a tame and conventional cartoon: an overemphasis on nuclear family and a normative investment in coupled romance." [8]
In the second chapter, Halberstam highlights things such as stupidity, forgetfulness, and how they have impacted views on queer culture. The second chapter illuminates how stupidity is viewed differently in men and women, and how it can sometimes even be a gateway for the queer culture. He uses certain movies and novels where stupidity and forgetfulness are joined to actually open the door for queer individuals.
In order to establish this analysis, Halberstam defines stupidity: "Stupidity conventionally means different things in relation to different subject positions; for example, stupidity in white men can signify new modes of domination, but stupidity in women of all ethnicities inevitably symbolizes their status as, in psychoanalytic terms, "castrated" or impaired." [9] Stupidity in women seems to be strictly looked down upon, while in men it can be seen as charming.
Halberstam shows that the film Dude, Where's My Car? is able to portray situations that would normally be uncomfortable for heterosexual white males, because of the stupidity of the main characters, Jesse and Chester. Halberstam writes that interjecting the idea of forgetting into Jesse and Chester's characters causes a queer phenomenon throughout the film. Jesse willingly knew that he was receiving a lap dance from a transsexual, but forgets the social norms that would typically accompany that. The film brought light to the gay community using stupidity and forgetfulness as a staple. Queer culture was brought to light in this film when Jesse and Chester share their convincing kiss at the end in their car next to a heterosexual couple. The stupidity of Jesse and Chester was the gateway into the kiss.
Halberstam writes that forgetting is important for queer people, who must forget social norms such as the heteronormative family in order to make way for equality. In Finding Nemo, Dory's forgetfulness brings about a queer version of selfhood, since it causes her to live in the present and forget about the past. Halberstam argues that forgetting opens up the doors for new things while suppressing negative memories, and notes the importance of forgetfulness in queer communities and how positive it can be.
In the sixth chapter, Halberstam focuses more on the specific works of queer theory scholars, and examines works such as Finding Nemo , Monsters, Inc., and A Bug's Life . Halberstam begins by criticizing Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Kung Fu Panda . Zizek compares the panda to George W. Bush, explaining that just like Bush, the panda rose to success because of the system, and that it was inherently tipped in his favor. Halberstam states that Kung Fu Panda "... joins new forms of animation to new conceptions of the human-animal divide to offer a very different political landscape than the one we inhabit, or at least the one Zizek imagines ..." [10]
Halberstam goes in-depth on the complexity of animation, specifically in A Bug's Life, where a new form of "crowd scenes" were introduced. Regarding stop-motion animation works Fantastic Mr. Fox, Chicken Run , and Coraline, Halberstam explains how ideas of racism, entrapment, masculinity, political progression, remote control, and imprisonment are present. The use of stop-motion animation can help evoke different emotions as well. For example, in Chicken Run, the start-stop jerkiness allows the narrative to be even more humorous.
Queer is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or are not cisgender. Originally meaning 'strange' or 'peculiar', queer came to be used pejoratively against LGBT people in the late 19th century. From the late 1980s, queer activists began to reclaim the word as a neutral or positive self-description.
Queer theory is a field of post-structuralist critical theory that emerged in the early 1990s out of queer studies and women's studies.
Heteronormativity is the concept that heterosexuality is the preferred or normal sexual orientation. It assumes the gender binary and that sexual and marital relations are most fitting between people of opposite sex.
Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and public intellectual.
"New queer cinema" is a term first coined by the academic B. Ruby Rich in Sight & Sound magazine in 1992 to define and describe a movement in queer-themed independent filmmaking in the early 1990s.
Circle of Life: An Environmental Fable was a 70 mm documentary, shown in the Harvest Theater in The Land pavilion at Epcot in Walt Disney World, Orlando, Florida. It opened on January 21, 1995, replacing Symbiosis. The main narrator of the story was Simba.
Jack Halberstam, also known as Judith Halberstam, is an American academic and author, best known for his book Female Masculinity (1998). His work focuses largely on feminism and queer and transgender identities in popular culture. Since 2017, Halberstam has been a professor in the department of English and Comparative Literature and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Previously, he worked as both director and professor at The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the associate professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC.
Kung Fu Panda is a 2008 American animated martial arts comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. The first installment in the Kung Fu Panda franchise, it was directed by John Stevenson and Mark Osborne, from a screenplay and story respectively written by the writing teams of Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger, and Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris. The film stars the voices of Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Ian McShane, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, David Cross, Randall Duk Kim, James Hong and Jackie Chan. The film, set in a version of ancient China populated by anthropomorphic animals, centers on a bumbling giant panda named Po (Black), a kung-fu enthusiast living in the Valley of Peace. When the savage snow leopard Tai Lung (McShane) is foretold to escape imprisonment and attack the Valley, Po is unwittingly named the "Dragon Warrior", a prophesied hero worthy of reading a scroll that has been intended to grant its reader limitless power.
Bisexual erasure, also called bisexual invisibility, is the tendency to ignore, remove, falsify, or re-explain evidence of bisexuality in history, academia, the news media, and other primary sources.
Feminist sexology is an offshoot of traditional studies of sexology that focuses on the intersectionality of sex and gender in relation to the sexual lives of women. Sexology has a basis in psychoanalysis, specifically Freudian theory, which played a big role in early sexology. This reactionary field of feminist sexology seeks to be inclusive of experiences of sexuality and break down the problematic ideas that have been expressed by sexology in the past. Feminist sexology shares many principles with the overarching field of sexology; in particular, it does not try to prescribe a certain path or "normality" for women's sexuality, but only observe and note the different and varied ways in which women express their sexuality. It is a young field, but one that is growing rapidly.
Queer heterosexuality is heterosexual practice or identity that is also controversially called queer. "Queer heterosexuality" is argued to consist of heterosexual, cisgender, and allosexual persons who show nontraditional gender expressions, or who adopt gender roles that differ from the hegemonic masculinity and femininity of their particular culture.
Kung Fu Panda is an American martial arts comedy media franchise that originally started in 2008 with the release of the animated film of the same name produced by DreamWorks Animation. Following the adventures of the titular Po Ping, a giant panda who is improbably chosen as the prophesied Dragon Warrior and becomes a master of kung fu, the franchise is set in a fantasy wuxia genre version of ancient China populated by anthropomorphic animals. Although everyone initially doubts him, including Po himself, he proves himself worthy as he strives to fulfill his destiny.
Compulsory heterosexuality, often shortened to comphet, is the theory that heterosexuality is assumed and enforced upon people by a patriarchal, allonormative, and heteronormative society. The term was popularized by Adrienne Rich in her 1980 essay titled "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence". According to Rich, social science and literature perpetuate the societal belief that women in every culture are believed to have an innate preference for romantic and sexual relationships with men. She argues that women's sexuality towards men is not always natural but is societally ingrained and scripted into women. Comphet describes the belief that society is overwhelmingly heterosexual and delegitimizes queer identities. As a result, it perpetuates homophobia and legal inequity for the LGBTQ+ community.
Queering is a technique used to challenge heteronormativity by analyzing places in a text that use heterosexuality or identity binaries. Coming out of queer theory in the late 1980s through the 1990s, queering is a method that can be applied to literature, film, and other media. Originally, the method of queering dealt more strictly with gender and sexuality, but quickly expanded to become more of an umbrella term for addressing identity as well as a range of systems of oppression and identity politics. Even the term queer itself can be queered, because much of queer theory involves working to fight against normalization even in the field itself. In the context of queer theory, "queering is something we do, rather than something we are ."
In feminist theory, heteropatriarchy or cisheteropatriarchy, is a socio-political system where (primarily) cisgender and heterosexual males have authority over other cisgender males, females, and people with other sexual orientations and gender identities. It is a term that emphasizes that discrimination against women and LGBT people is derived from the same sexist social principle.
Queer of color critique is an intersectional framework, grounded in Black feminism, that challenges the single-issue approach to queer theory by analyzing how power dynamics associated race, class, gender expression, sexuality, ability, culture and nationality influence the lived experiences of individuals and groups that hold one or more of these identities. Incorporating the scholarship and writings of Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Barbara Smith, Cathy Cohen, Brittney Cooper and Charlene A. Carruthers, the queer of color critique asks: what is queer about queer theory if we are analyzing sexuality as if it is removed from other identities? The queer of color critique expands queer politics and challenges queer activists to move out of a "single oppression framework" and incorporate the work and perspectives of differently marginalized identities into their politics, practices and organizations. The Combahee River Collective Statement clearly articulates the intersecting forces of power: "The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives." Queer of color critique demands that an intersectional lens be applied queer politics and illustrates the limitations and contradictions of queer theory without it. Exercised by activists, organizers, intellectuals, care workers and community members alike, the queer of color critique imagines and builds a world in which all people can thrive as their most authentic selves- without sacrificing any part of their identity.
Queer erasure refers to the tendency to intentionally or unintentionally remove LGBT groups or people from record, or downplay their significance, which includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer people. This erasure can be found in a number of written and oral texts, including popular and scholarly texts.
Queer ecology/ Queer ecologies is an endeavor to understand nature, biology, and sexuality in the light of queer theory, rejecting the presumptions that heterosexuality and cisgenderedness constitute any objective standard. It draws from science studies, ecofeminism, environmental justice, and queer geography. These perspectives break apart various "dualisms" that exist within human understandings of nature and culture.
Homonormativity is the adoption of heteronormative ideals and constructs onto LGBT culture and identity. It is predicated on the assumption that the norms and values of heterosexuality should be replicated and performed among homosexual people. Those who assert this theory claim homonormativity selectively privileges cisgender homosexuality as worthy of social acceptance.
Queer coding is the attribution of stereotypically queer traits to fictional characters without explicitly stating their gender and sexual identity.
Halberstam, Judith (2011). The Queer Art of Failure . Duke University Press.