“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.” – Quentin Crisp
People fail more often than they succeed; in any competition, there are inevitably more losers than winners. Yet failure is still widely treated as embarrassing or shameful, something to be hidden or quickly overcome. Even optimistic narratives that claim to celebrate failure tend to frame it only as a necessary step on the road to eventual success. In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith/Jack Halberstam challenges this assumption, exploring forgetfulness, stupidity, masochism, and rejection to propose failure as a mode for imagining queer histories and resisting heteronormative social structures. Drawing on “low theory”, (cultural texts such as television shows, children’s films, and other forms of popular media) Halberstam explores the radical potential of failure in shaping queer culture and identities.
Overview and Summary
The book starts off by introducing ‘Pixarvolt’, a genre of films produced by Pixar with overt or covert messages of rebellion. Halberstam claims that the inherent queerness of the child and their dependability on the adults in their lives makes them the perfect audience for narratives about rebellion and revolution. Moreover, such themes are typically not explored within adult media which tends to veer towards gritty realism, rather than idealist fantasies of revolution. This preference for realism extends to animation as a medium, which is typically relegated to the realm of children’s media due to its exaggerated, anthropomorphic portrayal of fictional characters, and idealist themes of community and self-actualization. He also talks about ‘The March of the Penguins’, a documentary about penguins, and how it views animals through a heternormative lens which eventually leads to bias and misreporting. Thus, heteronormativity becomes the mediational means through which these scientists view the world.
He builds a case for embracing, instead of rejecting, failure, negativity, and darkness as active elements of the ‘queer aesthetic’. For queer and other marginalized groups, forgetting normative societal structures and expectations can be a method to create new identities. It can also be a method of survival for many oppressed groups; to forget the past and move on ahead to live in the present. Furthermore, he discusses how incompetence and failure can be ‘weapons of the weak’; modes of resistance to rise up against their oppressors and critique dominant ideas of power.
Halberstam also examines alternative forms of femininity and feminism. He talks about the limits of Western feminism in dealing with varied forms of womanhood, especially when their material conditions and politics diverge from conventional feminist concerns. She suggests an ‘anti-social feminism’, a type of feminism ‘preoccupied by negation and negativity’ which does not place its activism within the same normative structure as that of the oppressor. Through an exploration of Yoko Ono and Marina Abramovic’s performance art, he suggests that radical passivity and masochism can be elements of subversive forms of feminism where dramatizing your own submission makes it seem more like performance than an inherent function of the female body (333). Halberstam also implores the queer community to reconcile with the more unsavoury parts of the history, in order to understand how queer history affects current manifestations of queerness She encourages critical engement with probematic elements of queer history, and to acknowledge that radical identities are not necessarily equanimous with radical politics (399). Finally, she ties her argument back to animated films, and how despite being produced by massive conglomerates for the sake of profit, these movies can serve a valuable function as sites of identity formation for the child.
‘The L Word’ – The Problem with Representation
Through a case study of the television show, ‘The L word’, Halberstam presents an argument against queer representations in mainstream media (240). Despite being a story about lesbians, it presented a version of lesbianism stripped of most of its queerness, with masculine-presenting, butch lesbians being denigrated in favour of the androgynous, yet distinctly feminine lesbian protagonist Shane. Despite its promise of representation, the narrative still views lesbians through the heteropatriarchal gaze, in order to make them palatable to mainstream, heterosexual audiences.
This is in line with Bollmer’s ideas about how representations ‘perpetuate the interests of dominant classes’ (26). He posits that changes in society and media representation come about through demands of the audiences (34). Though queer audiences might gain a sense of empowerment through it, this sort of representation serves to disarm them, all while propagating an exclusionary image of lesbianism which can be easily absorbed into the mainstream. This leads to an ‘unbearably positivist and progressive image of lesbianism’, one that is divorced from queerness and flattens queer representation down to fit a criteria of mainstream acceptability. Both Halberstam and Bollmer are instead in favour of anger, unhappiness, and dissatisfaction as conduits for change (Bollmer 32). These ‘negative’ emotions provide avenues for questioning normative ideas about queerness and other marginalized identities as perpetuated by the media.
Queer Temporalities
Halberstam talks about the Oedipal family structure based in normative temporality—a temporality grounded in repetitiveness and regularity that prioritizes permanence and longevity. In a hterosexual family, the figure of the child acts as the link connecting the past to the present and eventually, to the future. The child, according to Kathryn Bond Stockton, is already queer; a blank slate upon whom “proto-heterosexual(ity)” must be projected lest they disrupt the temporality of the heterosexual family (192). Meanwhile the queer community, through a rejection of heterosexual family ideals of succession and lineage, constructs a system of ‘sideways relations’, in which kinship ties grow parallelly, at the same time, rather than continuing onwards towards the future (Halberstam 192). For the queer community, “queer temporality constructs queer futurity as a break with heteronormative notions of time and history” (214). Thus, forgetfulness becomes particularly crucial in the construction of new queer relations and temporalities through a disruption of the normative order.
She uses ‘Finding Nemo’ as an example to emphasize how Dory’s forgetfulness allowed for the formation of a new, vaguely queer relation to be formed between her and the family unit of Martin and Nemo. At no point was she a stand-in mother for Nemo, or wife for Marlin.
Halbserstam also opens up the conversation about the historical relations between homosexuality and Nazism. Many queer scholars might steer clear of such contentious subjects, in fear of feeding into homophobia, but Halberstam claims that it is essential for the queer community to grapple with the more problematic elements of their history.
Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s idea of archives, which is ‘a system that groups and orders the past in a way that materializes it in the present’ she claims that the queer archive sanitizes queer history by focusing mainly on the oppression of gay men in Nazi Germany, while ignoring the ways in which masculine homosexuality collaborated with and overlapped with Nazism (Bollmer 65). She claims that an essential part of queer negativity is to also acknowledge these unsavoury parts of queer history, which often get relegated to the margins, to better understand how these elements of queer history shape current queer relations and culture (Halberstam 350).
Conclusion
‘The Queer Art of Failure’ was very much a product of its time. Many of Halberstam’s references now feel obscure or heavily US-centric, which can make the arguments difficult to follow though the point of using “low theory” was to draw from accessible popular media. The book was written before the large-scale rise of social media, yet many of its insights are still relevant today. It is fascinating to observe how the texts Halberstam analyzes have held up in modern pop culture. Many have stood the test of time and have become permanent structures of the current pop culture archive while others have been relegated to the margins. Halberstam’s focus on low-brow digital media is in line with our class discussions about power of media in shaping narratives. Their ability to inscribe and document have direct effects on how the archives of queerness are built, and how queer representation is transformed over time.
Works cited
- Bollmer, Grant. Materialist Media Theory An Introduction grant bollmer. London, England: Zed Books, 2021.
- Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Hi Insha! I love how you included traits that are outside the heterosexual perspective into queerness, which is a very novel idea for me. Considering how children and family members that are not included as common binary roles act as queer characters is an interesting topic. I also agree that many stories or shows on media feels plainly wrong when adapting the heterosexual narrative to everyone in the story – which is not natural or exactly meaningful in expressing the intended messages. Recently—or perhaps it has always been the case—tensions in gender relations have gradually gained broader recognition. Yet some works and games continue to deliberately portray women and minority groups according to stereotypes. Rather than promoting diversity, such depictions often reinforce clichés. In the end, aside from entertaining the so-called “mainstream,” they contribute little positive to the current social landscape.
At the same time, some creators rush to impose ill-fitting themes onto such characters, resulting in a disconnect that makes it difficult for most audiences to empathize. I feel many authors and creators should reconsider their heterosexual lenses before adapting them to the story. Stories sometimes have a lot more potential outside these lenses.
I found your review super engaging because you explained Halberstam’s ideas in a way that didn’t feel abstract or disconnected from concrete examples. The parts on “The L Word” and Finding Nemo were exciting; they made the theory feel grounded and really highlighted how failure, negativity, and forgetfulness can be used to rethink queerness instead of seeing them as flaws.
I also liked how you tied Bollmer into the discussion about representation. The point about positivity in queer media becoming a kind of flattening really stood out, and it made me think about how often “representation” is judged by mainstream standards instead of queer ones. Overall, your post flowed really well and made a dense book feel a lot more accessible.
The point about representation being judged by mainstream standard is one of realizations I also had while reading the book. While reading the section about the L Word, and how masculine presenting lesbians were dismissed as being a ‘stereotypical’ representation of lesbians, I realized that despite supporting queer liberation on a surface level, a lot of people do regard queerness with a certain sort of disdain.
Of course, I cannot speak for everyone but from what I could gauge from Halberstam’s text, it seems that he shares a similar opinion.
Hi Insha! Your review does such a good job showing how Halberstam reframes failure from something shameful into something creatively and politically productive. I especially liked the way you highlighted “negativity” not as pessimism but as a method, an alternative way of imagining queer history, feminism, and even time itself. Your discussion of The L Word was great! It really shows how representation can flatten queerness into something palatable rather than disruptive, which connects nicely to Bollmer’s points about how media can neutralize radical politics.
I also found your section on queer temporality really interesting. The example of Dory in Finding Nemo makes the idea of “sideways relations” easy to understand, showing how forgetting or stepping outside normative time opens space for different kinds of relationships. And your point about the need to confront the uncomfortable parts of queer history felt important. It shows how Halberstam treats “negativity” not just as refusal, but as a way of holding complexity that mainstream narratives often smooth over.
Overall, I love how your review brings out how Halberstam’s use of “low theory” includes alternative ways of thinking about identity, community, and power. I think you’ve captured well why this book continues to matter.
I really liked how this post explores Halberstam’s argument that failure and negativity are tools for imagining queer identities and resisting normative social structures. The examples from children’s media and mainstream shows like The L Word truly made me understand how easily queer experiences can be simplified for broader audiences, often erasing the complexities of real-life identities. And it led me to the idea, if failure and negativity are essential to creating authentic queer futures, is it possible for mainstream media to ever fully represent queer experiences without compromising them?
Well, I would hope so but the fact remains that most of the popular media being created right now is made or distributed by conglomerates that value profit above all else. Even subversive queer media that arises out of the margins gets appropriated by the centre once it achieves a certain level of fame, which eventually leads to them being stripped of all the elements that once made afforded them their own unique identity.