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A review by trebor
The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam
2.0
I really wanted to like this book and considered giving it 3 stars to escape having to actually grasp why I think it fails in what it's trying to do. The introduction even had me excited, I'm a sucker for Gramsci and thinking on counterhegemony but I really think the book just fails to fulfill the promise of its opening or even to present a coherent argument throughout.
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. Using failure to resist societal structures (failing to be a woman, failing at heterosexuality as a form of resistance to normative ways of being) and non-typical forms of knowledge (such as animation as they can often reveal more than overtly political texts can) along with "failing". Failing here in this sense means to both "fail" to take typical routes of knowledge acquisition and "fail" to endorse typical types of recognition and achievement (such as university or academic success), this leads to a "creative destruction" of our hegemonic modes of thought.
Sound great and I was skeptical but on board, sadly the book then descends into an overanalyzed and frustratingly unclear analysis of animation and film, punctuated by moments of insight that are genuinely interesting. Stupidity in men vs in women and forgetfulness as resistance to generational forms of knowledge are insightful but this is the high point of this book's theorizing which is mostly made up of reading queerness inherently into animation (which any dialectical Marxist understanding of technology would laugh at).
It frustrates me in several places with ideas of radical passivity in feminism or surface-level criticisms of liberal feminism that lead it to accept cultural practices simply because they come from other cultures, no attempt at actually understanding those practices beyond the surface-level arguments for them is made.
I'm left with a few interesting thoughts but no cohesive understanding of what exactly is being argued here. There is very little coherency in its across the whole text, and like so many postmodern queer or feminist texts I'm left wondering if its use of this writing style consisting of overly academic language when it's not warranted is a subconscious attempt to justify the book or theories existence on the level of accepted academic theories, or if I'm actually just too stupid to understand whats going on here.
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. Using failure to resist societal structures (failing to be a woman, failing at heterosexuality as a form of resistance to normative ways of being) and non-typical forms of knowledge (such as animation as they can often reveal more than overtly political texts can) along with "failing". Failing here in this sense means to both "fail" to take typical routes of knowledge acquisition and "fail" to endorse typical types of recognition and achievement (such as university or academic success), this leads to a "creative destruction" of our hegemonic modes of thought.
Sound great and I was skeptical but on board, sadly the book then descends into an overanalyzed and frustratingly unclear analysis of animation and film, punctuated by moments of insight that are genuinely interesting. Stupidity in men vs in women and forgetfulness as resistance to generational forms of knowledge are insightful but this is the high point of this book's theorizing which is mostly made up of reading queerness inherently into animation (which any dialectical Marxist understanding of technology would laugh at).
It frustrates me in several places with ideas of radical passivity in feminism or surface-level criticisms of liberal feminism that lead it to accept cultural practices simply because they come from other cultures, no attempt at actually understanding those practices beyond the surface-level arguments for them is made.
I'm left with a few interesting thoughts but no cohesive understanding of what exactly is being argued here. There is very little coherency in its across the whole text, and like so many postmodern queer or feminist texts I'm left wondering if its use of this writing style consisting of overly academic language when it's not warranted is a subconscious attempt to justify the book or theories existence on the level of accepted academic theories, or if I'm actually just too stupid to understand whats going on here.