Jens Secret Diary

03.11.23 / The Queer Art of Failure

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What You’re Missing: “...As a highly visible trans person, it’s often difficult to know how much of my personal failures are down to oppression, and how much is down to me being legitimately not talented enough...”

I read a good book recently called “The Queer Art of Failure” by Jack Halberstam. It’s one of those popular academia books that takes a sort of almost absurdist approach to theory. For example, there is a whole chapter that is a “queer reading” of the film “Dude, Where’s My Car?”. It kind of relishes in taking those huge analytical leaps, and I guess I have found it useful as inspiration when I’m writing my “Charlie Kaufman is Trans” series (episode one out now btw). But if I had one critique of the book, I’d say that it doesn’t focus enough on the main idea of “queer failure”. It sort of trails off at points into talking about other things (like Chicken Run being a lesbian utopia allegory) and I dunno, maybe that’s the point? Maybe he’s highlighting “queer failure” by literally failing (at times) to write a cohesive book on queer failure. I want to stress that I really enjoyed the book. It’s just, as someone who is queer myself, and as someone who frequently thinks of themselves as a failure, I’m just really interested in the idea of reclaiming failure as a positive.