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The Queer Art of Failure
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
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. 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.
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Paris, 1933: Three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called phenomenology. "You see," he says, "if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!"
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Consistent look at incoherent philosophy
- By Gary on 06-19-16
By: Sarah Bakewell
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Silence and Beauty
- Hidden Faith Born of Suffering
- By: Makoto Fujimura, Philip Yancey - foreword
- Narrated by: Ova Saopeng
- Length: 9 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Shusaku Endo's novel Silence took visual artist Makoto Fujimura on a pilgrimage of grappling with the nature of art, the significance of pain, and his own cultural heritage. His artistic faith journey overlaps with Endo's as he uncovers deep layers of meaning in Japanese history and literature, expressed in art both past and present. He finds connections to how faith is lived amid trauma and glimpses of how the Gospel is conveyed in Christ-hidden cultures.
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A unique book of history and reflections
- By M. Burlingame on 02-26-18
By: Makoto Fujimura, and others
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Not Gay
- Sex Between Straight White Men
- By: Jane Ward
- Narrated by: Dara Rosenberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Not Gay thrusts deep into a world where straight guy-on-guy action is not a myth but a reality: There's fraternity and military hazing rituals, where new recruits are made to grab each other's penises and stick fingers up their fellow members' anuses; online personal ads, where straight men seek other straight men to masturbate with; and, last but not least, the long and clandestine history of straight men frequenting public restrooms for sexual encounters with other men.
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Extreme Feminism and Liberalism
- By David McDougall on 01-17-18
By: Jane Ward
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Before We Were Trans
- A New History of Gender
- By: Dr. Kit Heyam Ph.D
- Narrated by: Dr. Kit Heyam Ph.D
- Length: 8 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Before We Were Trans illuminates the stories of people across the globe, from antiquity to the present, whose experiences of gender have defied binary categories. Blending historical analysis with sharp cultural criticism, trans historian and activist Kit Heyam offers a new, radically inclusive trans history, chronicling expressions of trans experience that are often overlooked, like gender-nonconforming fashion and wartime stage performance. Heyam looks to the past to uncover new horizons for possible trans futures.
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The history we need right now
- By Daniel Hebert on 04-11-23
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The Story Paradox
- How Our Love of Storytelling Builds Societies and Tears Them Down
- By: Jonathan Gottschall
- Narrated by: Joshua Kane
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Humans are storytelling animals. Stories are what make our societies possible. Countless books celebrate their virtues. But Jonathan Gottschall, an expert on the science of stories, argues that there is a dark side to storytelling we can no longer ignore. Storytelling, the very tradition that built human civilization, may be the thing that destroys it.
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A bit of a mixed bag with some amazing discussion
- By Justin on 04-27-22
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The Western Canon
- The Books and School of the Ages
- By: Harold Bloom
- Narrated by: James Armstrong
- Length: 22 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism. Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western Canon.....
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A personal and opinionated book on the Canon
- By Steffen on 07-23-12
By: Harold Bloom
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William Blake vs the World
- By: John Higgs
- Narrated by: John Higgs
- Length: 11 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A wild and unexpected journey through culture, science, philosophy, and religion to better understand the mercurial genius of William Blake.
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Best book ever
- By idamae on 11-04-22
By: John Higgs
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Nothing Ever Dies
- Vietnam and the Memory of War
- By: Viet Thanh Nguyen
- Narrated by: P. J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Nothing Ever Dies, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes. All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory. From the author of the best-selling novel The Sympathizer comes a searching exploration of a conflict that lives on in the collective memory of both the Americans and the Vietnamese.
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Good, probably should be read and not listened to via audible for the best experience.
- By Tanya on 10-24-16
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What Love Is
- And What It Could Be
- By: Carrie Jenkins
- Narrated by: Carrie Jenkins
- Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components.
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What Philosophy Is and What It Could Be
- By Amazon Customer on 03-09-17
By: Carrie Jenkins
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Women & Power
- A Manifesto
- By: Mary Beard
- Narrated by: Mary Beard
- Length: 1 hr and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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At long last, Mary Beard addresses in one brave book the misogynists and trolls who mercilessly attack and demean women the world over, including, very often, Mary herself. In Women & Power, she traces the origins of this misogyny to its ancient roots, examining the pitfalls of gender and the ways that history has mistreated strong women since time immemorial.
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Short and fabulous
- By André C. on 03-13-20
By: Mary Beard
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Jung
- A Very Short Introduction
- By: Anthony Stevens
- Narrated by: Tim Pigott-Smith
- Length: 3 hrs and 52 mins
- Abridged
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Anthony Stevens argues that Jung's visionary powers and profound spirituality have helped many to find an alternative set of values to the arid materialism prevailing Western society.
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Very nice - will not be disappointed
- By Edgar on 12-15-05
By: Anthony Stevens
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Dark Star Rising
- Magick and Power in the Age of Trump
- By: Gary Lachman
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Within the concentric circles of Trump's regime lies an unseen culture of occultists, power-seekers, and mind-magicians whose influence is on the rise. In this unparalleled account, historian Gary Lachman examines the influence of occult and esoteric philosophy on the unexpected rise of the alt-right.
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Step Right This Way!
- By Brad on 06-03-18
By: Gary Lachman
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Been wanting for a long time to read Gender Trouble
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The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of Harley Earl, who put fins on cars; Dick and Mac McDonald and Ray Kroc, who mass-produced the American hamburger; Kemmons Wilson, who placed his Holiday Inns along the nation's roadsides; and more.
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one of the very best
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Been wanting for a long time to read Gender Trouble
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The work of queer autistic scholar Nick Walker has played a key role in the evolving discourse on human neurodiversity. Neuroqueer Heresies collects a decade's worth of Dr. Walker's most influential writings, along with new commentary by the author and new material on her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory. This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm.
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What listeners say about The Queer Art of Failure
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Sonya
- 03-29-23
interesting
this book has some interesting views on popular culture. definitely would recommend it to others
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- Emile Durant
- 06-11-23
Enjoyable if you put on your Fun Time Hat
Other people reviewing this saying it could have been a Twitter thread, that none of it connects or makes sense, or that it’s too fatalistic, really don’t make any sense to me. He starts the book out with a spongebob quote. Honestly, as someone who’s read a lot of low theory and academic work, I found it very cheeky. It’s a funny book! I laughed out loud multiple times. Maybe I just have a very dry, gallows style humor. But this book, beyond just being a fun background voice for me to listen to while crafting, has some pretty helpful reminders that to cisheteronormative culture, queer people do look like failures, and it’s very easy to internalize. But you don’t need to. You can own your “failures” as proof that you are living outside of these ideals.
Idk I think some of y’all are just haters
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- P. B. Javier Alejandro
- 08-21-23
El título no está muy relacionado con el texto.
Me costó seguirle. Si bien la premisa de explorar otros modos y películas menos "intelectuales" para aprender sonaba interesante al principio, cuando llegué al capítulo de "Dude Where's My Car" me costó conseguirle el por qué de ese análisis, y así mismo el para qué de este libro.
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- That Grrrl
- 09-01-22
Not recommended
I read this for a writing project because the editors referenced it, so I thought I should read it. Sadly, I agree with the other reviews. There were some bits that I bookmarked towards the beginning because I thought they were worth coming back to, and I had an expectation that those bits would be further explored later in the book, but they weren't. I found it all disjointed, without a clear thesis, and meandering. Chapters on wildly disparate topics were never tied together. As another reviewer said, there was attention to "low theory" at the outset, but the book was mostly academic to the point of being impenetrable. When I write reviews like this, I try to say something positive, no matter my overall impression. The performance was good, but that's not a good enough reason to read this.
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- MEB
- 08-16-24
too dry to get into
the audio sounded like ai and was way too academic for me. I tried multiple chapters but the phrasing and constant references to other people's work was over my head
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- Oliver Kimsey
- 05-16-21
More Disturbing/Fatalistic than Interesting
I don't think I've ever felt more intensely ambivalent about a text in my life, nor a book that presented interesting and personally relevant ideas only to cut them up and destroy any semblance of decency and hope I had for the endeavor and the world writ large.
Off the bat I must admit the narrator was wonderful, I listened to another book read by him a while back and both were brilliant.
As to the book and its contents, for as much as it is dedicated to 'low theory,' I found its discussions of negativity and queerness often employed a lot of academic jargon that were just confusing and difficult to slog through for those not in the know. This is deeper than an audience and tone problem because the subject matter is incomprehensibly dark at times for the uninitiated, and having a little Foucault under the belt would have softened the blow.
Though in its introduction Jack invokes Beclett's notion of "failing better," through the book, I'd argue that many of the book's nessages amount to teaching someone how to fail WORSE, outside of the handful of interesting and positive examples it provides from its so-called 'Pixar-volt' film analysis. It is also self-contradictory in a deeply problematic way. An entire chapter is devoted to forgetting in relation to its power to circumvent the passing on of societal and person trauma and dominant narratives, and yet in future chapters dealig with destruction, femininity, and negative views of queerness it unironically cites Freud's notion of the death drive and criticizes the attempt of queer people to be seen as worthy of legitimacy (not in their quest for respectability politics, but in their rejection of failure and pain).
This book, if taken seriously or even with a half-hearted "whoa, that's deep bro" pothead sensibility, is fundamentally accelerationist. It was written in 2011 (narration is what's from 2019) and its emphasis on negativity includes positive and/or netral notions of self-destruction as a response to elude genderization for women, colonization, etc. When you hear/read a phrase like "cutting is a feminist aesthetic" (in context referring to a depiction in a deeply disturbing film), it doesn't exactly give you confidence in the intentions of the author (though they are not a cishet person nor a fascist by any means) and the view of failure and refusal the text fits into.
In an era full of doomers and white male antisocial rage, a world post-Trump administration and a pandemic in which millions have died and no one is happy, frankly no one who is queer or on the left gives a damn about the 'interesting possibilies' an antisocial feminism involving masochism could provide. Some of us want to live and love, and find the book's notion that queer people challenge straight people by revealing 'the impossibility of love/desire' offensive. This is painful to say because I want a feminism and queer politics that can understand and work with and dismantle oppression while also understanding the ways in which a woman might desire her own unbecoming and destruction, but a raw presentation and celebration of suicidality and self harm is not the way to go about it. I don't want the destruction of colonial narratives and subjects to have to be through the refusal of a colonized people to have families, I don't want queer liberation to have to involve identifying with loneliness and melancholy, and I don't want to embrace the same destructive tendencies that I can readily watch play out in heterosexual family members' lives for the purpose of being outside the normative notions of relationships or whatever. I wanted a book centered on failure to be good and interesting, but of that low bar it only succeeded in keeping my attention.
If there ever could be such a thing as the 'alt-left,' it would be some of the notions offered in this book, and I'm a socialist who thinks equating neofascists with unpopular forms of leftism is factually wrong. It shares the same accelerationist outlook towards destruction and lack of understanding. To quote Elizabeth Sandifer, from Neoreaction: A Basilisk, about the subject: "the essential horror of the abyss is stupidity. That's why it's an abyss. The unique and exquisite danger of stupidity is that by its nature, it is beyond reason. There is nothing that can be said to it, because by definition it wouldn't understand. It is an ur-basilisk - the one terrifying possibility that haunts every single argument that has ever been made ... It is, in its way, the only approach that can never lose an argument." This book is a collection of interesting notions found from recognizing queer failure drowned in an abyss of stupidity. It a sort of celebration of limits and despair and destruction as queer legacies and resistance rather than a learning exercise or exploration. It is, in that sense, accelerationist: accelerationist in its approach towards death, pain, self-shattering, the broken state of the world, and negativity. Should you be of unstable or concerned for your mental health, don't buy this or even take a step near it. It will hurt you, and god knows depending on your own level of self-acceptance you might end up running away to whatever homophobic evangelical religion you grew up with to make sense of the world. "A thing cannoy be unknown. The only solution is to never encounter these ideas in the first place," and no matter how much I might want to empathize with and learn from someone's passivity, stupidity, and suidical urges, I'm not going to promote a book that explores and venerates these things as a powerful queer rebellion against society or that treats them on equal footing with resistance and trying to be and exist. Jack, in the introduction, mentions that they were once considered "unteachable" in school, and for as much as I want to take the conclusions and intellectuals journeys they came to seriously, the deeper I fell into the book the more that fact looks like a red flag about them.
TL;DR
If you don't like stupidity and/or have a notion of queer positivity, don't buy this. If you're looking for a book about learning something valuable or actually resisting oppression through failure (like I was), you will be sorely disappointed: don't buy this book. If you're queer and also religious, don't read this book. If you have any sort of suicidal ideation or behavior, don't even think about buying this book. Buy this book if, and only if, you're a postmodernist who is also content to swim in its negativity and engagement with failing forms of subjective experience without finding any real solutions, hope, or positive imagination after the deconstruction.
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- Ruben Gil
- 06-28-22
This could’ve been a Twitter thread
This reads more like a fancily organized reading list than a book. The book’s thesis was unclear and its examples unconnected. Read some Maggie Nelson or Susan Sontag instead.
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- Gregory Griffith
- 04-01-21
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An unfocused book with little of interest to say, but much to say it with.
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