The Queer Art of Failure

By: Jack Halberstam

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives - to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Halberstam proposes "low theory" as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a willingness to fail and to lose one's way, to pursue difficult questions about complicity, and to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and low theory, high culture and low culture, Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in popular culture, avant-garde performance, and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention to animated children's films, revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between the childish, the transformative, and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative, cooperative, and surprising ways of being in the world, even as it forces us to face the dark side of life, love, and libido.

©2011 Duke University Press (P)2019 Tantor

interesting

this book has some interesting views on popular culture. definitely would recommend it to others

Great listen

Had this book recommended to me and went into it having no idea or expectation about what it was about. Suffice to say I really liked the book, listened to some chapters a twice to get as much juice out of it as possible. I was not familiar with many of the artists, movies, and writers named here yet I found it easy enough to follow and understand. The reader does a great job and made it easier to follow along in the slower parts.

Enjoyable if you put on your Fun Time Hat

Other people reviewing this saying it could have been a Twitter thread, that none of it connects or makes sense, or that it’s too fatalistic, really don’t make any sense to me. He starts the book out with a spongebob quote. Honestly, as someone who’s read a lot of low theory and academic work, I found it very cheeky. It’s a funny book! I laughed out loud multiple times. Maybe I just have a very dry, gallows style humor. But this book, beyond just being a fun background voice for me to listen to while crafting, has some pretty helpful reminders that to cisheteronormative culture, queer people do look like failures, and it’s very easy to internalize. But you don’t need to. You can own your “failures” as proof that you are living outside of these ideals.

Idk I think some of y’all are just haters

El título no está muy relacionado con el texto.

Me costó seguirle. Si bien la premisa de explorar otros modos y películas menos "intelectuales" para aprender sonaba interesante al principio, cuando llegué al capítulo de "Dude Where's My Car" me costó conseguirle el por qué de ese análisis, y así mismo el para qué de este libro.

Not recommended

I read this for a writing project because the editors referenced it, so I thought I should read it. Sadly, I agree with the other reviews. There were some bits that I bookmarked towards the beginning because I thought they were worth coming back to, and I had an expectation that those bits would be further explored later in the book, but they weren't. I found it all disjointed, without a clear thesis, and meandering. Chapters on wildly disparate topics were never tied together. As another reviewer said, there was attention to "low theory" at the outset, but the book was mostly academic to the point of being impenetrable. When I write reviews like this, I try to say something positive, no matter my overall impression. The performance was good, but that's not a good enough reason to read this.