Failure a la Halberstam and stuff

Failure – it’s the hallmark of the other, the queer, the outsider.   Halberstam links it to animation, performance art, painting, photography, and writing.  For Halberstam, it is in attempted revolution, in forgetting, in passivity and negativity, in fascism, and in running the heck away from danger.    

Why failure?   Does success necessarily imply a lack of queerness or sleeping with the enemy?   Does succeeding in, for instance, a civil rights movement, mean that one has become the dominant power, and is now the one who creates the otherness?  It is not as is we could truly know this, since no civil rights movement has had such a total success – they are all rife with failures, or, as a good Americans, what we could call successes not yet achieved.

When the animated chickens revolt and the females reject individualism for collectivism, they do succeed in escape, though not in the American individualist Clint Eastwood sense that the rooster attempted.  But it’s not a failure.  It is just a failure of individualism.  It was a raging success for collectivist bird behaviors.

Similarly, when penguins or albatrosses engage in same sex mating (I might say “lez it up” if I were a reporter), they successfully rear their young as much as they need to do by their biological imperatives,  though not by our anthropomorphistic models.   Clearly a success from a biologist’s point of view, if not a filmmaker’s or priest’s.

I fail (ha) to see how collectivism that works is a failure or reproduction that results in living offspring is a failure.  I reject the idea that a life lived to the tune of its own religion or politics is necessarily a failure.  If Halberstam is only speaking from the context of capitalism, Christianity, and heteronormativity, then she is taking a point of view that is almost entirely U.S.-normed, not even necessarily merely colonial or Western. 

From the U.S., John Wayne, heterosexist, racialized, individualist, capitalist, masculinized point-of-view, then, yes, these are all failures.  But they achieve the ends to which they are striving. 

In the name of failure at traditional family, Dory the fish creates a family of friends.   I have done the same, but I see my family of friends, of queers, of weirdos, of loonies to be a complete and total success, even if it was a failure at heteronormative family.  Three of the five children in our blended family of failures are planning to be in our “getting committed” party in drag – the only girl in a suit as the Ring Bear (in a bear mask).  The two youngest boys in dresses, because they like to feel pretty.  My partner and I will be in Praying Mantis masks, and my sister wants to be my best man in a cowgirl outfit.  How can we say no to this kind of raucous, delicious, lively, ludicrous success at failing to be a Protestant heterosexual wedding party?
If this is failure, I, for one, never wish to succeed.  If failing means that I will never see a salary over $25k a year, because I am psychologically incapable of wearing suits and working for the man to ruin people’s financial situations, then so be it.  I will be a brilliant success at financial failure like my father.

Yes, it sucks to be on the wrong end of the stick.  Yes, it’s disappointing to be in last place, but has Halberstam been to a race?  Experienced waiting till the last people trail, and watching them,   complete and utter failures, picking up their feet and crossing the finish, somehow?  Has ze met two friends at the finish who were picked up by the bus, seen them proud of failing, because failure still meant they succeeded in trying?  Perhaps so.  Perhaps that’s why ze admires failure so highly, especially  in the context of  US normativity. 

When we refuse to participate, refuse to assimilate, then, in that context, we’ve failure miserably as Americans.  The supermercados in Georgia, then, are full of failures, people who refuse to learn the language, who advertise their employability on bulletin boards.  The gay Hispanic owned coffee shop in Cumming that closed for financial reasons was a colossal failure that brought together the gay community, the Hispanic community, and the EMT community in one place to eat mango helado and drink lattes.  Tragic failure.  Total success at queering up a small town.

What about the gigantic failures?  Was the Nazi movement a failure because of, despite of, in conjunction with its homosexual membership and prosecution?  That’s not entirely clear to me.  Or is the failure that they lost the war, while simultaneously embracing and rejecting male homosexuality?  Is the pink triangle a salute to this failure or to survival, fighting, and running away successfully?

When Dory lost her memory, her family, she found a new grouping, not a heteronormative family, not a reproductive family unit.  But that unit fails mightily, loudly, and with police sirens and gigantic court cases on a day to day basis, and those are the successes?  Halberstam doesn’t really address failure within the white capitalist, male world.  Maybe because there is still a real winning for the men in those cases, and the women are still the majority of the brilliant failures, falling into bizarre communities like mine that include every weirdo who fails to fit the paradigm of success.

On a completely irrelevant note: I wish Halberstam would have looked at nerddom, since ze addressed so many of the underdogs of the world.  Those of us who have pushed our glasses up our noses and been shunned by the ones who do have sex wouldn’t mind being included in that failure milieu.