Wondering about queer failure now

Pixar movies as discussed by Halberstam may help to wonder about the measures taken by many governments and about the modes of meaning-making due to Corona. Following Halberstam with regard to her ‘silly archive’ of animated feature films, survival in this (penguin) world has little to do with fitness and everything to do with collective will (p. 41). Similarly, the most valuable lesson that Nemo learns is not to “be himself” or “follow his dreams”, but to be more like Ginger in Chicken Run, he learns to think with others and to work for a more collective futurity. Halberstam argues that animated worlds have their own internal logics with growing and living matter (p. 177). They are disruptions to the habitual methods of thought, imaginative alternatives to the real. I am wondering if we may imagine alternatives to the real and a collective futurity now.

Halberstam criticizes the contemporary idea of the human as a desire for uniqueness, or an unalienated relation to work and others, or as a fantasy of liberty (p.46) and the banality of straight culture and the repetitiveness and unimaginativeness of heteronormativity (p. 117). He suggests a style of failure quite possibly a lesbian style and queerness as a mode of critique. Because to live is to fail, to struggle, to disappoint and to die (p. 187). Luckily, stupidity and forgetfulness work hand in hand to open up new and different ways of being in relation to time, truth, being, living and dying (p. 54). Therefore, anti-disciplinary forms of knowing tied to queerness: stupidity, failure and forgetfulness need to be preferred over knowing, mastering and remembering (p. 148). I wonder how we may relate failure and anti-disciplinary forms of knowing to governmental measures informed by data-driven science.

Interestingly, following Halberstam, the child is always queer and a queer form of anti-development requires a healthy doses of forgetting and disavowal and proceeds by way of series of substitutions [...] Queer culture enacts rupture as substitution as the queer child steps out of the assembly line of heterosexual production and turns toward a new project (p. 73). Halberstam finds in Dory a new version of selfhood, a queer version that depends upon the disconnection from family and contingent relations to friends and improvised relations to community. [...] Dory forgets family and tradition and lineage and biological relation and lives to create relationality anew in each moment and for each context and without a teleology and on behalf of the chaotic potentiality of the random action (p. 80). I wonder if and how our selfhood, the connection to family and the relations to friends and the community may be transformed.

To conclude, Halberstam quotes Kincaid: “I will not give the happy ending. I think life is difficult and that’s that. I am not at all - absolutely not at all - interested in the pursuit of happiness. I am not interested in the pursuit of positivity. I am interested in pursuing a truth, and the truth often seems to be not happiness but it’s opposite” (p. 132). Instead, Halberstam proposes that the commitment to fail and to fail better gives way to a desire of oddly normative markers of accomplishment and satisfaction (p. 187). I wonder if optimisms in relation to Corona may be cruel or if the commitment to failure may be an alternative.