Judith Halberstam

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. Judith 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. She 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.

The Queer Art of Failure

Jack Halberstam

Masculinity without men. In Female Masculinity Judith Halberstam takes aim at the protected status of male masculinity and shows that female masculinity has offered a distinct alternative to it for well over two hundred years. Providing the first full-length study on this subject, Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from nineteenth-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. Through detailed textual readings as well as empirical research, Halberstam uncovers a hidden history of female masculinities while arguing for a more nuanced understanding of gender categories that would incorporate rather than pathologize them. She rereads Anne Lister's diaries and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness as foundational assertions of female masculine identity. She considers the enigma of the stone butch and the politics surrounding butch/femme roles within lesbian communities. She also explores issues of transsexuality among "transgender dykes"--lesbians who pass as men--and female-to-male transsexuals who may find the label of "lesbian" a temporary refuge. Halberstam also tackles such topics as women and boxing, butches in Hollywood and independent cinema, and the phenomenon of male impersonators. Female Masculinity signals a new understanding of masculine behaviors and identities, and a new direction in interdisciplinary queer scholarship. Illustrated with nearly forty photographs, including portraits, film stills, and drag king performance shots, this book provides an extensive record of the wide range of female masculinities. And as Halberstam clearly demonstrates, female masculinity is not some bad imitation of virility, but a lively and dramatic staging of hybrid and minority genders.

Female Masculinity

J. Jack Halberstam

Examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space

Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

In a Queer Time and Place

Analyzes the transformative political and societal shifts of recent decades that have paved the way for revolutionary conceptualizations of gender and marriage, using Lady Gaga as a symbol of a new era that embraces sexual fluidity.

Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal

Gaga Feminism

In this examination of the monster as cultural object, Judith Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference. Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters

Skin Shows

Anne Rice

Stephen King

Michel Foucault

William Gibson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Andrew O'Hagan

Umberto Eco

Slavoj Žižek

Sigmund Freud

Jean Baudrillard

Mike Kelley

Beatriz Colomina

James Sampson Meyer

Mary Shelley

Patrick McGrath

Jeff Wall

Jacques Lacan

Marina Warner

Hal Foster

Jerry Saltz

Damien Hirst

Amelia Jones

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Nancy Spector

Julia Kristeva

Edmund Burke

Mark Edmundson

Richard Dyer

Bret Easton Ellis

Edgar Allan Poe

Richard Davenport-Hines

Douglas Crimp

Gianni Jetzer

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

Carol J. Clover

Trevor J. Fairbrother

Anthony Vidler

Elisabeth Bronfen

Bruce Hainley

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Kate Ferguson Ellis

Kobena Mercer

Stan Douglas

Alex Farquharson

Jane D. Marsching

Mark Alice Durant

Nike Bätzner

Michael Cohen (kustos.)

Tacita Dean

Christoph Grünenberg

Jonathan Jones (likovni kritik.)

Shamim Momin

Andrew Ross (Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis.)

Jaques Derrida

Part of the acclaimed 'Documents of Contemporary Art' series of anthologies. This collection of writings examines the pervasive and influential role of the Gothic in contemporary art, providing the first comprehensive overview of its uses within contemporary visual culture. The Gothic includes artists' writings by Mike Kelley, Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean, Jonathan Meese and Catherine Sullivan, complemented by literary extracts from Horace Walpole, William Gibson, Bret Easton Ellis and Stephen King, and theoretical writings by such key thinkers as Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Julia Kristeva, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Marina Warner and Slavoj Žižek. Artists surveyed include Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Tacita Dean, Sue de Beer, Janet Cardiff, Mark Dion, Stan Douglas, Robert Gober, Douglas Gordon, Dan Graham, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Teresa Margolles, Jonathan Meese, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Gregor Schneider, Cindy Sherman, Catherine Sullivan, Andy Warhol, and Jane and Louise Wilson. Writers include Jean Baudrillard, Elizabeth Bronfen, Edmund Burke, Carol Clover, Beatriz Colomina, Douglas Crimp, Jacques Derrida, Richard Dyer, Umberto Eco, Bret Easton Ellis, Trevor Fairbrother, Alex Farquharson, Hal Foster, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, William Gibson, Christoph Grunenberg, Bruce Hainley, Judith Halberstam, Amelia Jones, Jonathan Jones, Mike Kelley, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Lacan, Patrick McGrath, Kobena Mercer, James Meyer, Edgar Allan Poe, Andrew Ross, Jerry Saltz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Mary Shelley, Nancy Spector, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anthony Vidler, Jeff Wall, Horace Walpole, Marina Warner, Anne Williams and Slavoj Žižek.

The Gothic

Kara Keeling

Lisa Lowe

DIVThrough an analysis of filmic representations of Black femininity, and the Black Femme in particular, this book highlights the ways "the cinematic" structures both racist and sexist portrayals, and their potential undoing./div

The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense

The Witch's Flight

Cuvallamanin Queer Sanati

José Esteban Muñoz

David L. Eng

This special double issue of Social Text reexamines the term queer and the mainstreaming of gay and lesbian identity in context of the global crises of the late twentieth century. These include the growth of neoliberalism; the clash of religious fundament

What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?

Halberstam catalogs the diversity of gender expressions among masculine women from 19th-century pre-lesbian practices to contemporary drag king performances. "Thank goodness for the dashing Judith Halberstam! Her new book is a smart, entertaining, and informed tour of that most threatening of cultural identities: the masculine female. Oh yum!"--Kate Bornstein, author of "My Gender Workbook". 38 photos. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Parasites and perverts: an introduction to gothic monstrosity -- Making monsters: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Gothic surface, gothic depth: the subject of secrecy in Stevenson and Wilde -- Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Reading counterclockwise: paranoid gothic or gothic paranoia? -- Bodies that splatter: queers and chain saws -- Skinflick: posthuman genderin Jonathan Demme's The silence of the lambs -- Conclusion: serial killing.

Del LaGrace Volcano

What is a drag king? Why have drag kings not been as numerous or as popular as their drag queen counterparts in popular culture? Are drag kings lesbians? The Drag King Book tells you everything you've wanted to know and more about the lives and performances of contemporary male impersonators. The book profiles many different performers, among them San Francisco's larger-than-life Elvis Herselvis and New York's mackdaddy Dred, and presents interviews with drag kings alongside descriptions and analyses of actual shows. Lavishly illustrated with over 100 pictures by transgender photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, The Drag King Book is a striking testament to the multiple forms of gender variance today.

The Drag King Book

Judith Halberstam

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