The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam (review)

In the claymation film Chicken Run (2000), the feminist activist chicken, Ginger, attempts to rouse her sisters in the coop to join the revolt. In the midst of a rousing speech, she declares “We either die free chickens, or we die trying.” Rather than rising to the allure of such binary thinking, the “stupid” chicken, Babs, asks “Are those the only choices?”. Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure is a celebration of such “stupidity” that point to other ways of thinking, and so other ways of being. Her study of what happens when one chooses not to be a success (becoming Babs-style free chickens), and opts out of the thinking that demands that “you are either with us or you are against us” is a queer study in the widest sense of the term. It is queer in the way that it rejects binarisms such as male-female and homosexual-heterosexual, and it is queer in way that it revalues the subjects it uncovers.

The Queer Art of Failure is a provocative, hilarious, and insightful study of cultural manifestations of failure that practices exactly what it preaches. Adopting “low theory,”—“a kind of theoretical model that flies below the radar, that is assembled from eccentric texts and examples” (16)—Halberstam does not impose an established theoretical perspective onto her varied materials, but rather builds out from the animated films, art work, kitsch, and pop culture to develop not so much a thesis as an impression of what the potential of counter-intuitive thinking, silliness, forgetting—in short, failure—might have to offer, not as a pause on the way to success, but rather as a celebration of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick terms “middle ranges of agency” (13): the kinds of non-extreme power most of us have.

Animated films for children form much of the source material for Halberstam’s provocative argument. A well-established queer theorist best known for her insights into sub-cultures, this is Halberstam’s first adventure into the realm of children’s film studies. Given that her goals include a celebration of the trivial, I was not initially well-disposed towards her argument, but it is hard to stay angry with a theorist who cites SpongeBob SquarePants as an authority figure. Halberstam argues that “To captivate the child audience, an animated film cannot deal only in the realms of success and triumph and perfection” (27). Children are doomed to failure in a world that identifies success in adult terms, and so if a work is to appeal to the child, then it must celebrate the middle ranges of agency, the kinds of power children have at their disposal. Unlike more traditional studies of children’s empowerment, Halberstam is not seeking out examples where children subvert the adult-child binarism to emerge triumphant, even if only for a carnivalesque moment. Instead, she shows how films such as A Bug’s Life (1998) and Bee Movie (2007) can celebrate collective achievements over those of the individual: an alternative way of being which rejects individualist, capitalist culture by simply opting out.

The book is not exclusively a study of animation films and childhood. It includes a chapter addressing the fetishized place of Nazi uniforms in gay culture, as well as sections of chapters on nature films, sport photography, and the work of artists who celebrate failure. The disparate nature of the material contributes to her argument that positive, creative forms of failure are present in all areas of humanity, but we have been trained to look away, and to ignore these other ways of being.

This is not a study for pompous academics, but to be fair, it is also not a study for the novice in the field of queer studies. The irony, the tongue-in-cheek humor, and the carnivalesque play with established modes of academic inquiry will be lost on those who are new to the field. But for those of us who have become somewhat jaded, who have lost sight of the...