Queer Art Of Failure 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.

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.

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").

But why should women and queer people learn to forget? Generational logic underpins our investments in the dialectic of memory and forgetting;

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.

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.

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")

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.

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.

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.

I wrote this book to give a little record of one more queer person...I lived, I loved, I was here-mess and all. I wrote this book to prove without a doubt that drag is natural and can disrupt boundaries of masculine and feminine, self and community, art and revolution, past and present, success and failure. Drag belongs on the world stage, like queer people belong in the world! Now I'm passing this archive on to you. If you are reading this, you're part of my family now-who else would want to read these stories? I hope you can use this book in your own life: as a tool to show how drag can be revolution, camp, and art at the same time; as a textbook to learn the queer histories of religion, drama, and costume; at least as a prop for your bookshelf. I suggest using it as a fortune-telling deck-choose a page at random, then channel the image or phrase you land on for the day.