The Queer Art of Failure by Halberstam is a key text for queer clowning and also is an excellent example of 20 year old queer theory with all its strengths and weaknesses.
The book suggests a political programme as much as a meant to analysis. ‘“Legibility,” writes Scott, “is a condition of manipulation” (1999: 183).’ (p 10) so we cope with that by becoming illegible. ‘Resist mastery. Here we might insist upon a critique of the “all-encompassing and global theories” identified by Foucault. In my book this resistance takes the form of investing in counterintuitive modes of knowing such as failure and stupidity; we might read failure, for example, as a refusal of mastery, a critique of the intuitive connections within capitalism between success and profit, and as a counterhegemonic discourse of losing. Stupidity could refer not simply to a lack of knowledge but to the limits of certain forms of knowing and certain ways of inhabiting structures of knowing.” (p 10-11)
But could this be both dated and kind of passive? ‘I do believe that if you watch Dude, Where’s My Car? slowly and repeatedly and while perfectly sober, the mysteries of the universe may be revealed to you. I also believe that Finding Nemo contains a secret plan for world revolution and that Chicken Run charts an outline of feminist utopia for those who can see beyond the feathers and eggs.’ (p 21)
No, but really, there’s a lot here to unpack.
‘Chicken Run is different from Toy Story in that the Oedipal falls away as a point of reference in favor of a Gramscian structure of counterhegemony engineered by organic (chicken) intellectuals. In this film an anarchist’s utopia is actually realized as a stateless place without a farmer, an unfenced territory with no owners, a diverse (sort of, they are mostly female) collective motivated by survival, pleasure, and the control of one’s own labor. The chickens dream up and inhabit this utopian field, which we glimpse briefly at the film’s conclusion, and they find their way there by eschewing a “natural” solution to their imprisonment (flying out of the coop using their wings) and engineering an ideological one (they must all pull together to power the plane they build). Chicken Run also rejects the individualistic solution offered by Rocky the Rooster (voiced by Mel Gibson) in favor of group logics. As for the queer element, well, they are chickens, and so, at least in Chicken Run, utopia is a green field full of female birds with just the occasional rooster strutting around. The revolution in this instance is feminist and animated.’ (p 32)
Of course, Halberstam was writing in the Bush years, when they said, ‘And yet if we must live with the logic of white male stupidity, and it seems we must, then understanding its form, its seductions, and its power are mandatory. Dude offers a surprisingly complete allegorical map of what Raymond Williams calls “lived hegemony.” ‘ (p 60)
The Bush years were indeed defined by an intentional ignorance, and a feigned benign folkiness, which sought to mask the violence. The ableist framing of stupidity, in retrospect, feels like the wrong analysis for then and especially now. Instead, one thinks not only of a good ol boy, but also Sartre writing about verbal play, by antisemites. Knowledge, ignorance and understanding is a game to them. This intentional ignorance is a privilege because truth doesn’t matter and reality need not touch them. Their unknowing is an assertion of power. They don’t need to know.
In his book On Bullshit, Frankfurt differentiates between lying and bullshitting by noting that liars are being deliberately unthruthful in particular points that they have to keep track of. Liars care about truth. Bullshitters, on the other hand, have no regard for truth or falsehood whatsoever and will fake whatever context is required.
Trumpism is grounded in bullshit. The knowledge gap shows that one is either pledging allegiance to the bullshit of others, or creating bullshit oneself. Lack of knowledge is power and facts are treason.
Halberstam goes on to talk about generational transmission. “De-linking the process of generation from the force of historical process is a queer kind of project…. We may want to forget family and forget lineage and forget tradition in order to start from a new place, not the place where the old engenders the new, where the old makes a place for the new , bit where the new begins afresh, unfettered by memory, tradition, and usable pasts.” (p 70)
The problem of lgbt people is sometimes articulated as too little history and a lack of intergenerational transmission. Whereas the problem of Judaism is too much history propagated as intergenerational trauma. So where does that leave the queer Jew? Groups like Queer Yeshiva, where I first heard this contradiction stated, seek to claim the history and by action, cause the old to make space for the new. Every generation reinvents Judaism.
Halberstam, also Jewish, accepts the queer blank state as given and seeks to use it as a model to divest themselves of all the burden of history.
But we have the same amount of history as anyone else. Catholic schools also transmit history, including a history (but not a present) of prosecution. And queers do have elders, histories and stories which are subject to an intentional erasure. We do not forget Oscar Wilde, but section 28 sought to impose amnesia. I think we can take it as given that Halberstam does not wish to copy that.
It’s also worth noting that Halberstam’s analysis predates the gayby boom. Childless queers were the norm when this was written, whereas now, it’s far more common for queers to visibly have kids, with their queer partners in their queer relationships. Indeed, it’s also much less common that a parent would lose custody for queerness, which was absolutely the case in the US before Lawrence v Texas. Blue laws in California weren’t enforced, but they were on the books. Every queer in a custody dispute was guilty of regular felonies.
“Edelman uses this sense of the queer in order to propose a relentless form of negativity in place of the forward-looking, reproductive and heteronormative politics of hope that animates all too many political projects. … The queer subject, he argues, has been bound epistemologically to negativity, to nonsense, to antiproduction, and to unintelligibility, and instead of fighting this characterisation by dragging queerness into recognition, he proposes that we embrace the negativity that we anyway structurally represent.” (106)
But if “the heteronormative political imagination propels itself forward in time and space through the indisputably positive image of the child,” (ibid) what about now, 20 years later, when that child asserts gender-nonconformity and non-heterosexual yearnings? Of course, the heteronormative imagination also, “projects itself back on the past through the dignified image of the parent, the queer subject stands between heterosexual optimism and its realisation.” (ibid) Which is necessarily complicated when the child, themselves, asserts the agency that scuppers heteronormative continuity. If no adult queer stands there, creating the barrier, then one must be invented to be excluded. If the kids are catching ROGD off of twitter, then social media must be banned.
But what does it mean for queerness as failure when my queer friends are having or adopting children and when those kids themselves come out? IS an eight year old who is certain of their nonbinary status really groping about in the dark like a lesbian at a 1930s Paris nightclub? Or have they found a new queerness on the daylight playgrounds they inhabit?
Can this, itself, be a form of hope in the midst of such intense repression and looming fascism? Are fighting for these nonbinary kids to have unimaginable queer futures in a somewhat less climate-fucked world? If so, how does the engagement of imagination within the play-failure of the clown enable this world building? Is it our adult world with it’s self-important reproductive drive that must be shown to have failed? Or is this failure so self-evident, so catastrophic, that the time to dwell on it is long past. Leave the navel gazing to the gerentocracy as it dies.
The forward looking hope of the previous generation of Nazis, confidentially singing “the future belongs to me” in ‘Cabaret’ is, itself, a historical projection. The Nazis of a century ago killed others. The current branch yearn also for their own demise, as they burn petrol like there’s no tomorrow, like they wish there to be no tomorrow.
Halberstam rejects optimism as a programme. “to simply repudiate the [social and systemic, rather than essential] connections between queerness and negativity is to commit to an unbearably positivist and progressive understanding of the queer, one that results in the perky depictions of lesbians in ‘The L Word’ or the reduction of gay men in film and on TV to impossibly good-looking arbiters of taste.” (p 98)
However, I would argue that what disrupts the reproductive child is not a shadowy queer blocking a hetero transmission, but rather a teacher shining a light on history, context and the skills of self articulation. This sounds optimistic, but it is not.
When this liberatory programme detours into optimism, we get the baggage and responsibilities dumped on to Gen X youth. We were informed, from basically the age of 10, that we would fix climate change, fix racism, fix all the world’s woes, thus relieving our elders from the burden of acting. Witney Huston sang this as an anthem:
“I believe the children are our future /
Teach them well and let them lead the way”
This heroic / optimistic abdication of responsibility could be accomplished by building up our self-esteem with empty puffery:
“Learning to love yourself
/ It is the greatest love of all”
An actual program of world improvement should empower youth to escape heterocapitalist structures, but they certainly can’t be left to do this alone. It’s not enough to fail to transmit normative power structures, but necessary to collaborate on their overthrow.
Is a revolution a queer failure? Is being ungovernable a failure? Or is a queer failure an act of sabotage of the machine that tries to crush us? Under the rubric of neoliberalism, solidarity is failure.
Works Cited
Please see: https://www.celesteh.com/blog/2026/03/09/organs-clowns-and-queers-delete-as-appropriate/
