J. Jack Halberstam > Quotes

“Being taken seriously means missing out on the chance to be frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant. The desire to be taken seriously is precisely what compels people to follow the tried and true paths of knowledge production around which I would like to map a few detours.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“This is a story of art without markets, drama without a script, narrative without progress. The queer art of failure turns on the impossible, the improbable, the unlikely, and the unremarkable. It quietly loses, and in losing it imagines other goals for life, for love, for art, and for being.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, the inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant; I believe in making a difference by thinking little thoughts and sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Rather than searching for ways around death and disappointment, the queer art of failure involves the acceptance of the finite, the embrace, of the absurd, the silly, and the hopelessly goofy. Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures" (The Queer Art of Failure, "Ending, Fleeing, Surviving").”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.”
― Judith Halberstam

“...we need to think about sex and gender in a more ecological kind of framework, understanding that changes in one environment inevitably impact changes in other environments. Gender here might be thought of more as a climate or ecosystem and less as an identity or discrete bodily location.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

“But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Since at least the year 2000 and the election of George Bush, Americans have shown themselves to be increasingly enamored with the heroic couplet of men and stupidity. As the election in 2004 proved, playing dumb means playing to "the people," who, apparently, find intellectual acumen to be a sign of overeducation, elitism, and Washington insider status. As many critics have pointed out, no one could be more of a Washington insider than George W. Bush, the son of a former president and the brother of the governor of Florida. Even so, in both of his election campaigns Bush made a populist version of stupidity into a trademark and sold himself to the public as a down-home guy, a fun BBQpaI, a man's man, a student privileged enough to go to Yale
but "real" enough to only get Cs-in other words, an inarticulate, monolingual buffoon who was a safe bet for the White House because he was not trying to befuddle an increasingly uneducated populace with facts, figures, or, god forbid, ideas. His opponent in the election, John Kerry, was fluent in French, well educated, well spoken, and highly suspicious on all counts.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“We seem to assume that no one really wants to be a girl or a woman, and therefore some people, say female-bodied people, must be forced into these abject genders”
― Judith Halberstam

“In a crisis, do not remain calm, do not look for the nearest exit, do not stick your head in the sand; do agitate, do make things worse, do run screaming through the street, and do refuse to return to business as usual. Business as usual is what created this mess in the first place. Business as usual has meant that businesspeople and corporate fat cats run/ruin the world and artists are out of luck; it has meant that education, spirituality, sexuality all must function on a business model and every attempt to make changes is greeted with a pragmatic question about whether changing things will also mean making money. Making money cannot be the goal of the new feminism. Putting women in positions of power is not what gaga feminism wants. What gaga feminism wants cannot be easily summarized, but it is not an independent bank account, not a profitable nonprofit; mama does not want a brand new bag. Mama wants revolution.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

“If we want to make the antisocial
turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort
zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity,
one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to
be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up
and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.”
― J. Jack Halberstam

“If we want to make the antisocial turn in queer theory we must be willing to turn away from the comfort zone of polite exchange in order to embrace a truly political negativity, one that promises, this time, to fail, to make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite, to breed resentment, to bash back, to speak up and out, to disrupt, assassinate, shock, and annihilate.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life...but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life...but it is up to us whether we choose to make good on that promise in a way that makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction" (The Queer Art of Failure, "Ending, Fleeing, Surviving")”
― Jack Halberstam

“The normative temporal and spatial frames of historical materialism have ironically forced a congruence between Marxist and bourgeois definitions of civilization, both of which cast racialized nonnormative sexualities as anterior and as signs of disorder and social chaos within an otherwise stable social system. The contingency of queer relations, their uncertainty, irregularity, and even perversity, disregards the so-called natural bonds between memory and futurity, and in the process make an implicit argument for forgetfulness.”
― Jack Halberstam

“This is the history of un-art—the cultural productions that are not intended to convey beauty, not organized around the notion of singular genius expres- sion, not designed to sooth audiences and to confirm the order of things. Un-art comes to unmake worlds.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire

“Collage precisely references the spaces in between and refuses to respect the boundaries that usually delineate self from other, art object from museum, and the copy from the original.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

“Cuando la lógica que fija la forma corporal a la práctica social desaparece, cuando las narrativas de sexo, género y corporalidad se relajan y se vuelven menos fijas en relación con la verdad, la autenticidad, la originalidad y la identidad, tenemos el espacio y el tiempo para imaginarnos los cuerpos de otra manera.”
― Jack Halberstam, Trans*: Una guía rápida y peculiar de la variabilidad de género

“In an interview in The New York Times Magazine in 2016, Alison Bechdel, who appeared in the photograph accompanying the piece dressed in a very smart tailored suit, was asked: “In Fun Home, you wrote about becoming a connoisseur of masculinity at a young age. Today a young person like you would be more likely to identify as transgender than gay. Is the butch lesbian endangered?” “Well, first of all, great question!! Second, wow, in the New York Times? Really? Third, well, is the butch endangered?” Bechdel answers adroitly: “I think the way I first understood my lesbianism, before I had more of a political awareness of it, was like: Oh, I’m a man trapped in a female body. I would’ve just gone down that road if it had been there. But I’m so glad it wasn’t, because I really like being this kind of unusual woman. I like making this new space in the world.”
― J. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

“...no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing “this shit down” until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for some of us, they are bad for all of us.”
― Jack Halberstam

“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. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well; for queers failure can be a style, to cite Quentin Crisp, or a way of life, to cite Foucault, and it can stand in contrast to the grim scenarios of success that depend upon "trying and trying again." In fact if success requires so much effort, then maybe failure is easier in the long run and offers different rewards.”
― J. Jack Halberstam