Nothing succeeds like failure
which will soon gain the right to have "studies" added to it. American Foucauldians who haven't read Nietzsche have decided that the only way to "talk back to power" is to make it an interdiscipinary field of academic specialization. Is there thought or research or basic analysis going on here? No! There is a great deal of display of subcultural privilege, mockery of the reproduction obsessed heteronormative types (like yours truly I suppose) and playing for laughs all in the insider's manner of perpetual subversiveness.
Failure studies, it turns out is a stunning success: accessing the failure as the new frontier of subversion, the logic of 80s cultural studies is extended in a realm where politics is will to power actualized as pure ambition, and critical thinking is realized as the display of one's subcultural credentials. As anyone who can use google will find out, the speaker whose talk I listened to recently is fully booked with speaking engagements all over the world.
Queer studies has identified the most hideous form of domination is -- normativity, with heteronormativity as the main culprit and reproductive heteronormativity as the New Lucifer. The queer and about to be failure studies scholar I listened to did deign to mention the term "capitalism" (my thought was, why bother when we know that heteronormativity is the true enemy?). It turned out that for failure studies, there are in fact hierarchies of failure, with -- you guessed it, the white heteronormative brand being the wrong kind. After reading passages from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting about Scottish junkie self-loathing, the speaker indicated that Welsh's losers were -- well failures at failing. Compared unfavorably with Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of my Mother unfavorably for its anti-colonial rhetoric, Welsh is consigned to the category of failed failures, and Kincaid, elevated to what? Exemplary expression of anti-colonial self-critique? But where is her "failure"? I am, by the way, an admirer of both books -- but to compare them in this way is absurd.
Even though I, like the "studies" people and almost everyone else in America, feel marginal and under-represented -- harried writer/blogger Ph.D. mothers unite! being a married woman and a mother, I realized, I couldn't even fail properly according to her standards of "normativity." I had succeeded all too well and said speaker had her revenge on my heterosexual ass.
Added to this was the typical demand for recognition of the marginal while celebrating the marginal's marginality at the same time. It turned out that this speaker hailed as the highest form of failure under capitalism the butch dyke -- because get this -- she can't sell anything and she can't get her own television show.
Proof of this "failure" was offered in the fact that Martina Navratilova only got two endorsements in her career!
I beg to differ dear scholar of failure. If one measures success by the sell, then fat does not sell, old age sells even worse, and the poor, they don't sell at all. So if you're poor. old and fat and a butch dyke, then you really don't sell, but at this point what are we even asking for? Equal opportunity marketing?
Failure studies, it turns out is a stunning success: accessing the failure as the new frontier of subversion, the logic of 80s cultural studies is extended in a realm where politics is will to power actualized as pure ambition, and critical thinking is realized as the display of one's subcultural credentials. As anyone who can use google will find out, the speaker whose talk I listened to recently is fully booked with speaking engagements all over the world.
Queer studies has identified the most hideous form of domination is -- normativity, with heteronormativity as the main culprit and reproductive heteronormativity as the New Lucifer. The queer and about to be failure studies scholar I listened to did deign to mention the term "capitalism" (my thought was, why bother when we know that heteronormativity is the true enemy?). It turned out that for failure studies, there are in fact hierarchies of failure, with -- you guessed it, the white heteronormative brand being the wrong kind. After reading passages from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting about Scottish junkie self-loathing, the speaker indicated that Welsh's losers were -- well failures at failing. Compared unfavorably with Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of my Mother unfavorably for its anti-colonial rhetoric, Welsh is consigned to the category of failed failures, and Kincaid, elevated to what? Exemplary expression of anti-colonial self-critique? But where is her "failure"? I am, by the way, an admirer of both books -- but to compare them in this way is absurd.
Even though I, like the "studies" people and almost everyone else in America, feel marginal and under-represented -- harried writer/blogger Ph.D. mothers unite! being a married woman and a mother, I realized, I couldn't even fail properly according to her standards of "normativity." I had succeeded all too well and said speaker had her revenge on my heterosexual ass.
Added to this was the typical demand for recognition of the marginal while celebrating the marginal's marginality at the same time. It turned out that this speaker hailed as the highest form of failure under capitalism the butch dyke -- because get this -- she can't sell anything and she can't get her own television show.
Proof of this "failure" was offered in the fact that Martina Navratilova only got two endorsements in her career!
I beg to differ dear scholar of failure. If one measures success by the sell, then fat does not sell, old age sells even worse, and the poor, they don't sell at all. So if you're poor. old and fat and a butch dyke, then you really don't sell, but at this point what are we even asking for? Equal opportunity marketing?
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