The Queer Art of Failure is about finding alternatives-to conventional understandings of
success in a heteronormative capitalist society to academic disciplines that confirm what is
already known according to approved methods of knowing and to cultural criticism that claims
to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives. Jack Halberstam proposes “low theory”
as a mode of thinking and writing that operates at many different levels at once. Low theory is
derived from eccentric archives. It runs the risk of not being taken seriously. It entails a
willingness to fail and to lose one’s way to pursue difficult questions about complicity and
to find counterintuitive forms of resistance. Tacking back and forth between high theory and
low theory high culture and low culture Halberstam looks for the unexpected and subversive in
popular culture avant-garde performance and queer art. Halberstam pays particular attention
to animated children’s films revealing narratives filled with unexpected encounters between
the childish the transformative and the queer. Failure sometimes offers more creative
cooperative and surprising ways of being in the world even as it forces us to face the dark
side of life love and libido.
