Fellas, is it gay to fail? Yes, and it is also punk as hell. Let’s talk about it.

Queer art of Failure by Judith Halberstam

Jack/Judith Halberstam (he/him and she/her) is a modern queerness and gender philosopher, professor in the US and authoress of many books on gender and queer issues. A large part of his interest lies in female masculinity and the concept of tomboys. Halberstam is also known for coining the term “bathroom problem”: it describes a perceived genderly deviant person’s justification of being in a gender-policed zone (like a public bathroom) and how “passing” in such zone could affect that person’s identity.

In her book Queer Art of Failure, Halberstam approaches failure as something to be celebrated and embraced, and uses the argument of subversive intellectualism to see failure as an act of resistance against the restrictive societal standards of what is normal and/or successful. He suggests that unproductivity can be a radical alternative to the capitalistic heteronormative societal expectations, as well as open new ways of knowing and being. 

To support her argument, Halberstam introduces the concept of low theory. It is a mode of thinking that emphasizes the willingness to get lost and explore the “in-between spaces of high and low culture” (Halberstam, 2) to generate new forms of understanding. In other words, Halberstam suggests that wisdom and knowledge can be gathered in places other than university libraries and paywall-protected sites with highbrow studies. This is why Halberstam draws a lot of material for her analysis from animation and film and examines how these more modern and often less seriously perceived media represent the queer art of failure. Let us have a look, too!

What’s she saying?

In the very first chapter, Halberstam introduces a concept of a Pixarvolt as a genre of CGI movies about revolution and transformation, often connecting communitarian revolt and queer embodiment, showing them as equals and similars. It is important to note that while Pixar is the main producer of Pixarvolt stories, they aren’t the only ones and not everything they produce would be considered a Pixarvolt story. “The non-Pixarvolt animated features prefer family to collectivity, human individualism to social bonding, extraordinary individuals to diverse communities.” (Halberstam, 47) In Pixarvolt movies, desire for difference is not connected to a neoliberal “Be yourself!!” mentality – they connect it to selfishness, overconsumption, opposed to collective mentality. They don’t focus on the idea of nuclear family or classic romance. As such, The Incredibles, for example, cannot be considered a Pixarvolt story, since they focus on the outstanding individuals being opposed to their communities. 

Halberstam goes on to explore the theme of resistance to normality and the adult world in animated movies, such as Chicken Run, which here is viewed through multiple lenses: from class struggle and queerness to human exceptionalism. While chickens are not meant to represent literal birds in the movie, they are also used differently here than other animals are used in, say, Animal Farm. Chicken Run is not a fable about human folly told through animals, it explores ideas about humanness and alterity through the non-human characters being in the centre. 

In the second chapter, Halberstam explores themes of memory and stupidity, specifically male stupidity and its special place in the world of mainstream comedies like Dumb and Dumber (1994) and, most of all, Dude, Where’s My Car? (2000). While many things can be said about how male stupidity is treated as a charming way of knowing, as a way of openness (juxtaposed to female stupidity that is often portrayed as vain and shallow), for me, the question of memory was more interesting, since I was able to apply it to my own lived experience. 

Halberstam argues there is a duality to the act of forgetting. On one hand, many of us forget as a trauma response, as a way to move forward and not be slowed down by our past: “We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place” (Halberstam, 70). On another hand, it can be dangerous to forget, since those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it, and forgetting often means not holding people accountable: Halberstam uses the example of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the idea of “putting the slavery behind us”. By the end of the chapter, Halberstam reaches her conclusion: forgetting is required for new knowledge: “Learning in fact is part memorization and part forgetting, part accumulation and part erasure.” (83).

That was the first time that Halberstam’s theory spoke to me. It allowed me to reflect on the common experience of erasing traumatic events from your memory: if I don’t think about it, it did not happen to me, and I am fine. I think we’ve all been there. Dear reader, you should know better than that.

In the third chapter, Halberstam claims failure goes hand in hand with capitalism: “Heteronormative common sense leads to the equation of success with advancement, capital accumulation, family, ethical conduct, and hope.” (89). She also goes on to explore the intrinsically queer nature of failure by providing an anti-example of the Trainspotting story. In it, the main character is certainly undergoing a failure that is not queer, but this failure is a deliberate choice to “not choose life”. This choice to fail is allowed by society because of its “straightness”, and it can and will ultimately harm more marginalized groups in the process because of its nature. So how much of a failure can it be if the character actively chooses to “fail” within the system that will allow him to? The real, raw, almost agonizing failure, concludes Halberstam, is queer. 

She goes on to describe several projects on that topic of queer failures in all the various forms they take: my favourite is Tracey Moffat’s series Fourth, which captured Olympic sportspeople the second they realised they got in fourth. Almost on the pedestal. A second away from greatness. 

“Renton, Johnny Rotten, Ginger, Dory and Babe, like those athletes who finished fourth, remind us that there is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing […]” (Halberstam, 120)

The fourth chapter is focused on the concept of shadow feminism or anti-social feminism which take form in a radical negation and refusal as opposed to traditional activism. Looking at female negativity (e.g. self-destruction, passivity, disappearance) through the lens of anti-social feminism, Halberstam connects those acts with political critique and queer failure. She references Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece from 1964, where she sat on a stage, inviting people to cut her clothes. I personally think about this performance a lot sometimes, alongside Marina Abramovic and her Rhythm 0. They both navigate vulnerability and expose what Halberstam described as “the sadistic impulses that bourgeois audiences harbor toward the notion of woman” (137). I feel conflicted and wonder if the men cutting Yoko Ono’s clothes and puncturing Abramovic’s skin realise what the performance is. I wonder if they think about it at all, actually. 

Chapter five, subtitled “homosexuality and fascism”, takes a closer look at the intersection of sex and politics and gay men’s troubling involvement with Nazi regime to talk about the more contradictory pages of queer history. Halberstam goes through several examples of the fascist sexual imagery in art and artists that explore those topics in their more modern art (e.g.Tom of Finland and Collier Schorr). All attempts to “purify” queer history come from the same roots as heteronormative success-obsessed manic positivity, and if we are to talk about failure, some of those failures will be rather upsetting. We have to be ready to be unsettled by what we find when we look back: see why in chapter two on forgetting. 

Finally, in the last chapter, Halberstam focuses more on the medium of animation and how its affordances contribute to the messages that animated stories convey. This passage about how animation style influences the narrative really stood out to me:

“Two-dimensional cartoons often dealt with individual forms in linear sequences—a cat chasing a mouse, a cat chasing a bird, a wolf chasing a roadrunner, a dog chasing a cat. But CGI introduced numbers, groups, the multitude. Once you have an animation technique for the crowd, you need narratives about crowds, you need to animate the story line of the many and downplay the story line of the exception.” (Halberstam, 176)

While, obviously, not every computer animated story necessarily includes crowds and has anarchist undertones to it, it is an important affordance that Halberstam highlights: these stories were way more labour-consuming to produce before CGI. Now if a story of masses needed to be told, it could be. And oh boy were those stories told: Bugs Life, Finding Nemo, even WALL-E, in a way. 

Halberstam also goes on to discuss the specific affordances of stop-motion animation: the uncanny quality of shot-by-shot change between stillness and motion and how themes of remote control and entrapment grow out of the medium. 

Why do we care?

We care about Queer Art of Failure, because it provides new readings to pre-existing media like Chicken Run and Finding Nemo, and explains why it is important to see those narratives in a new way. We care because, as media studies students in a highly academic environment, we are prone to overlooking rich sources of material for analysis and discard them as childish and therefore not valuable. 

Halberstam, however, recognizes the importance of low theory and reminds us that pop culture can be a significant subject of analysis. She shows us how cartoons, often dismissed in academic circles, actually contain plethora of meanings and lenses, how animated animals can challenge our heteronormative notions of success, and how important it is to look at the negative aspects of media we’re consuming and the world we’re living in: on the stupidity, on unbecoming, on passivity. On failure. And on how it can be more than “a stop on your way to success”, but its own separate state, way of knowing and being.

Be gay, do crime, fail. This is how we learn.

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Work cited:

Halberstam J. The queer art of failure. Duke University Press; 2011

Written and illustrated by Bara Bogantseva