I think I’m a little late to the party on this one, my
apologies. School has taken a back seat to life this week.
I have to say, of all the reading we’ve done, I enjoyed the
hell out of The Queer Art of Failure.
Halberstam makes me think about queer in an entirely new way than the new way I learned to look at it this semester. I’m
currently making my girlfriend read it, too.
I love the idea of queer as failure, as anti-capitalism, as
community, as forgetting, as alternatives to the nuclear family. It’s the queer
way of knowing that makes failure an art. “The white man who made the pencil
also made the eraser,” as the proverb states. According to Halberstam, Dude, Where’s My Car? “is a meditation
on the precise terms of the relationship between whiteness, labor, and amnesia”
(Halberstam, 61). I was surprised by my agreement with her assessment of this
film, not that I believe it is queer in any intentional way, other than maybe
the kiss scene between the two main characters. It is interesting to see the
two white characters as dumb failures whose context includes guidance by very
queer characters, such as the transgendered couple.
Halberstam also explores the queerness in Finding Nemo, which speaks to reliance
on coalition and the unreliability and fault of family. Dory puts friends
first, and “in her lack of family memory, her exile in the present tense, her
ephemeral sense of knowledge, and her continuous sense of a lack of context,
Dory offers fascinationg models of queer time, queer knowledge practices, and
antifamilial kinship” (Halberstam, 81). The emphasis is NOT on the structure of
nuclear family, as Dory neither fills in as a mother for Nemo nor a lover for
Marlin.
As we also see in the example of Auschwitz, the act of
forgetting can lead to a queer knowing that rebuilds memory in a way that is
vital for the Holocaust survivors. “Never forget” is a slogan for those who
aren’t directly affected and don’t understand the value of forgetting to the
survivors.
That's the thing about Dude, Where's My Car...it doesn't really matter whether it is intentional or not. A work of art is just that; it does work. Whether the artist, or artists, intended the work to have such an effect is besides the point. The art gets away from the artist, and said artist must join the rest of us in the art's evaluation. Their intention does not affect the text one bit.
ReplyDeleteThat is to say, surely there are forces at play in artistic creativity that are not deliberate. If we take into account the artists intent, that would be like me handing in a paper, receiving a C on it and promptly giving it back and saying, well I intended to get an A.
Halberstam has made a fantastic case for Dude, where's my car being a queer film.