Failure – A Political Space

Today, I am writing a follow up from my last post about embracing failure, which is a concept that I use out of Jack Halberstam’s work “The Queer Art of Failure.” Failure, often times is seen as negative and as problematic. People associate failure with the inability to achieve a particular goal. However, failure can be seen in a more positive light as a method for political resistance. Failure becomes a way to disassociate ourselves with problematic hegemonic institutions and practices.

 

One of the major problems with the current fight for “queer rights” today, is that we have, or others have spoken on our behalf to fight for our inclusion into structures that have failed us. Marriage has become the perfect example of this. Marriage is the place where heteronormativity has been celebrated in addition to being a major sites for queer exclusion. It is the place in which the ideal nuclear family has been celebrated. Queer people that choose not to or refuse to conform to particular family structures are marked as deviant and for violence. Additionally, marriage is a failed institution. Divorce rates are high. It has turned into an economic incentive versus affective bonds between people. The list goes on.

 

So why do we think that marriage among other forms of inclusion are the solution? Why do we seek to make problematic structures and institutions like marriage that are opposed to queerness better? Why do we try including ourselves into a group of people that have no desire to call us their friend? Finally, why do we seek inclusion into spaces, just because some straight people like Macklemore have promoted our “inclusion?” The drive to fix these places that have always failed us can never be the answer. Heteronormativity and straightness have only perpetuated violence against difference. Every time we fail to “fix” the problem, we begin to hate ourselves because we just can’t understand why straight people are so hostile towards us, towards who we are, towards our culture. We just don’t understand why straight people can’t get it. Instead, we blame ourselves. We just didn’t fight hard enough. We couldn’t explain our similarities well enough. It becomes a never ending cycle in which queers will never be on the top.

 

This is not just a critique of marriage, but a call to let the places where anti-queerness thrives, to fail.  Embracing failure is a method of political resistance. Embracing failure is a strategy in which we refuse to participate in the spaces that have failed it. We allow for those spaces to collapse in on themselves. The problem is that we give failed institutions and spaces legitimacy through our continued search for inclusion. Instead of seeking participation and inclusion, failure becomes a space to stand in opposition.

 

Allison D. Carr explains,

Under certain circumstances, failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more  creative, more cooperative,  more surprising ways of being in the world” (2). Thus, failure as a term gets queered; playing with the idea that failure is something to be avoided, Halberstam urges us to discover the energetic underlife of failure as a tool for undoing narratives of hetero- success and progress.

And that,

adopting a lifestyle of failure, a way of living that allows us to escape the  punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and   predictable adulthoods. Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And where failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary   thinking.

 

Embracing failure is a way to work against the “progress narrative” that I mentioned in my previous post. Embracing failure is the refusal to seek inclusion and embracing the radical difference that queerness offers that exists at the periphery. It embraces the difference that we are told that we should give up so that we can conform to be the “ideal citizen.” 

Same Love Remix – Angel Haze

What happened last night was not equality. Ryan Lewis’s statement that, the event “will be, in our minds, the ultimate statement of equality, that all the couples are entitled to the same exact thing,” maps over the violence that queer people face everyday. It maps over the real hurt. Marriage is not equality. Equality is not being exposed to constant violence for who you are. To say that this was the “ultimate statement of equality,” exposes the worst of liberalism. We think that we have achieved something great when queers are still being beaten every day, kicked out of their homes, fired from their jobs, denied housing, and even killed.