class is long over, but I couldn't think of any other people that might want to read this more. or discuss it more.
http://jezebel.com/5928306/the-shining-knights-of-the-aurora-movie-theater

Last Post =(

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.

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.

oh who the fuck knows.

On page 111, he describes the swimming pool, empty and lifeless, and to think of it in terms of cost, of loss, the cycles of wealth. The empty swimming pool is the wasteland of broken dreams, of all that could not be accomplished. The buoyancy of the water will not keep you afloat. The stairs reaching for the bottom, but never quite getting there symbolize all that is hoped for and yet never achieved.

The empty swimming pool is symbolic to me of the queer art of failure. Or  The Queer: Art of Failure. Or The Queer Art: Failure. It is understanding what is normal, what is supposed to be, and then subverting those hopes/wishes/ideals. 

you forget these things as you grow older- to be a dweeb, to fall short, to get distracted. As a child, they are part and parcel of who you are, of your daily life. You go to school and it is drilled into your head to work hard, to be smart, to pay attention. In my life it was that and the pool, be the best, don't give up, don't quit, work harder than anyone else out there.

The queer art of failure helps you to understand that it is a-ok to lose your way, to find a limit, and to forget mastery. To know that the pool will not always be filled and the stairs won't reach the bottom- embrace it, revel it. Fail in it.

The Anti-Glamour of Losing: Resisting Success and Embracing Failure

The reimagining of failure as a way to deconstruct the normative mode of thinking is both fascinating and uncomfortable. Halberstam’s perspective regarding failure as “standing outside of conventional understandings of success” is a unique way to present the queer (not solely in terms of homosexuality) identity. Queer Theory, as I understand it, is the antithesis of the normative mode of thinking and being in the world; however, Halberstam further pushes this thought by positing that failure be considered optimistically. By re-evaluating the characteristics of capitalistic notions of success, we are able to see failure as a means to an end.

My favorite part of this text is the section in Chapter 3 entitled The Art of Losing. I am particularly drawn to this because Halberstam juxtaposes the dignity of losing with the anti-glamour of losing. Indeed, we live in a country where children are admonished for being “sore losers;” yet, these same children are made to believe that anything but first place is unacceptable. In reading this section, I immediately remembered an episode of Lifetime TV’s “Dance Moms.” The girls (all 9-11 years of age), lost the first place trophy by 1/10 of a point. Just as Halberstam suggests about 4^th place, Abby Lee Miller (the founder of the dance studio) heatedly advises her team that it would have been better to be dead last. It is the rejection of being “almost good” or “almost a star” that makes the idea of failure appealing and queer.

Lastly, I am extremely drawn to the idea of hidden history. In chapter 5, Halberstam writes that “gay and lesbian scholars have also hidden history, unsavory histories, and have a tendency to select from historical archives only the narratives that please” (148). It is in the hidden history that we see the all-encompassing fear of failure. I feel the need, in this instance, to draw a parallel between the African American and Queer communities. It is also true, that the African American story, (I reluctantly admit this), hides history and presents both pleasing and expected narratives. We expect to hear about that white community’s role in chattel slavery just as we expect to hear about the Nazi’s staunch homophobia. Each of these communities, in my opinion, has earned the right to present a positive image; yet, Halberstam would argue that the beauty in the failure should not be ignored.

While I'm not exactly sold on all of the ideas that Halberstam presents, I must admit that there is value in embracing failure. In order to successfully do this, we must change our ideas of the things that failure represents. Halberstam does not suggest that we embrace addiction, joblessness, and unproductivity, but rather that we alter our opinions regarding failure and sieze some opportunities to fail as a way to abolish the hegemony.

The Queer Art of Failure

I don't know about anyone else, but I couldn't put this book down! I appreciated how he took the time to think about how the public looks at LGBTQ's and understands that part of the misconception and trepidation people feel is based on a lack of concrete knowledge. When I examined myself coming into this class, I wondered what it would be like? Would I understand the theories and concepts? And what I have come to love about this class is it's honesty, I can say I asked myself if I would feel weird. I am a heterosexual married woman who has been with her husband since we were in high school. But I think the cheesy cliche's end there, because I have always had the mindset that people and their choices are their business. Who am I to judge them? There's enough judging going around the world, that's for sure, so why add any more onto someone's plate? I say all that because The Queer Art of Failure captured what I felt coming into this class and delivered to me a beautifully funny and irreverent yet serious message that I understood.

I am a television and movie nut. Although I think I should have prefaced that by saying I am a Food Network and Cooking Channel nut who throws in some other shows so the icons don't get burned into the bottom of the screen like the HSN logo on tv's in old folk's homes. I felt a kindred spirit in Jack. (I hope that is right--I would hate to feel connected to what he was saying and get his name wrong! I know the book says Judith but I believe he is going by Jack now so I am taking a leap of faith!) in that he uses popular television and film culture to explain high theory in a low theory kind of way so that people--much like myself walking into a class like ours--would understand and hopefully have some of those moments like I did where they say "Hey, I understand that!" or "I can relate to that!".

I think that as graduate students we are already those folks who walk into the program with an enormous amount of pressure. If you think about it, we are those people Jack describes as being on the precipice of failure, but where I think graduate students are blessed is that if we do fail at this monumental financial and mental burden that is our desire to be Master's we are still miles ahead of most people. We are college graduates and just based on that can go be a manager at McDonald's should we so desire to do so. Where I feel Jack deviates from the fall-off-the-horse-and-get-back-up motto is that he says it's not about that you can get back up it's that you fell in the first place and experienced some of that crushing tidal wave of despair at seeing your plans go down the crapper. It is here in that place that we are open to understand what the Queer community goes through just to be themselves. This is what opens minds and hearts to embrace something different. It doesn't mean that you fail grad school and decide that means you should be a trapeze artist now, but it means that you understand that being a trapeze artist is just as much a gift and expression of inner strength and beauty as holding that grad school diploma.

In closing I would like to say that I enjoyed this class VERY much and I am sorry to see it end. I hope to see you all in another class.

And Dr. Whitlock--thank you for teaching such a class. I truly enjoyed every minute and every page that you assigned. It opened my eyes to new ideas and even if I had to break out the dictionary on Butler I still enjoyed the experience. Blessings to you and your family and I hope to see you again.

--Amber--

Halberstam review.

Halberstam begins with a wonderful title and introduction. Failure is painted with quite a positive brush here, and the reversal is refreshing and queer in the very best way. The failure referred to here is the act of not living up to the roles that society has demanded of us or expected of us. If these roles are met we are considered inferior or lacking in some way. Sometimes we are even considered defective. Halberstam turns this failure into an art and a deliberate objective. The knowledable refusal to stay within the pre-existing boundries gives us freedom to live life according to ever-evolving guidelines that are informed upon our growing intellect and progressive development.

Halberstam, for me, was a joy because of the way she deals with movies including several animated films. I had never been much of a fan of animated films, save for a few classics like Toy Story, but this book has given me new interest in them. According to this book, animated films are some of the ripest for queer and psychoanalytic analysis. I had never thoguht of Dory and Marlin in Finding Nemo to be in a "queer temporal mod governed by the ephemeral, the temporary and the elusive"(pp.54)  but Halberstam clearly identifies Dory as a "Queer Fish"(pp. 54.)

Her analysis of Dude where's my Car is hilarious and confirms what I've always thought about that film; there is more to it than meets the eye. This goes the same for Halberstam's writing on Chicken Run, Bee Movie, Toy Story and many others. Halberstam has given a very interesting template for "queering" films. Films do not have to be read with the grain, sometimes, or most times, it provides a more revealing look at the film if you read it for what is under the surface. With film, there is the potential for increasingly subtle and interestingly subversive moves and at the same time there is room for insideously propagandistic moves.

I'm glad that the book was so pre-occupied with films because that is what I primarily study. This was a fantastic read, and I would even say a required read for Queer Studies.