From Optimism to Failure..... A Small Step (2)

But there are other moments when the book implicitly refers to Cruel Optimism. 

For example: 'Embracing Failure' (which the book recommends) is described as a way of 'poking holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.'

This 'toxic positivity' - and its hysterical embrace of 'positive thinking' - is described as an 'American perversity.'

Halberstam evokes the specific temporality of this toxic positivity that recalls Berlant, i.e. the hope that this time things will be different: "Failure can stand in contrast with the scenarios of success that depend upon ‘trying and trying again..." (3) 

While success is defined as "reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation," failure,  is described as a way of 'being in the world,' - a queer way of being in the world - it opens to "ways of being and knowing that stand outside conventional understandings of success."  (2) 

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In short, Cruel Optimism is about straightness - or rather the desire to be straight, or the fantasy of straightness as something that is achievable. It is about straightness as something what we live as a form of 'persistence,' a grim holding on to a set of schemes, stories, expectations, and genres of living. 

Of course, one doesn't have to be heterosexual to be spooked by the fantasy of straightness, but the fantasy of straightness is, Halberstam reminds us, hetero at its core. It is, after all, a fantasy of 'reproductive maturity' 

Halberstam's queer embrace of failure, on the other hand seems - at least to me - surprisingly hetero-friendly. It's embrace of the immature, the infantile, the silly.