Jack Halberstam
Author of Female Masculinity
About the Author
Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and the author of several books, including The Queer Art of Failure and SKIN Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.
Image credit: https://www.publicbooks.org/author/jack-halberstam/
Works by Jack Halberstam
Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Queer Ideas/Queer Action) (2012) 173 copies, 1 review
Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe) (2020) 42 copies
Queer Masculinity (Belladonna* #149) 2 copies
El arte queer del fracaso 1 copy
Associated Works
Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice (2012) — Contributor — 5 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Halberstam, Jack
- Other names
- Halberstam, J. Jack
Halbertam, Judith - Birthdate
- 1961-12-15
- Gender
- non-binary
- Nationality
- USA
- Education
- University of California, Berkeley (BA|1985)
University of Minnesota (MA|1989|Ph.D|1991) - Occupations
- Professor
Literary Scholar - Organizations
- Columbia University
Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality
University of Southern California
Center for Feminist Research
University of California, San Diego - Awards and honors
- Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction (1999)
Arcus/Places Prize (2018)
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Reviews
Lists
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 23
- Also by
- 6
- Members
- 2,100
- Popularity
- #12,257
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 11
- ISBNs
- 44
- Languages
- 4
- Favorited
- 5
1. Those who feel like failures most of the time, in part because because they find most popular markers of success tedious and unappealing, and in part due to general negativity;
2. Those who feel like failures in academia because the corporate imperatives to perpetually publish, to sell education to students, and to market yourself are repellent and exhaustingly difficult;
3. Those who, despite deep ambivalence about academia, genuinely enjoy reading theory and do so as a leisure activity;
4. Those who alternate reading depressing non-fiction with watching trashy American films;
5. Those who are tired of heteronormativity.
I am all five of these people, so this book delighted me. Halberstam wanders across high and low culture, through various areas of theory, tacitly endorsing scholarship that isn’t particularly useful or constructive. Although I didn’t agree with, or even understand, every idea in the book, I greatly appreciated its defence of laziness, fallibility, and the analysis of animated kids films. I took particular pleasure in the brazen re-purposing of academic theory as a rationale for being a lazy and reluctant academic. From the introduction:
This has an intuitive appeal for me. Subsequent chapters examine an intriguing range of topics relating to queerness and failure. One considers animation, another masochism, another forgetfulness, yet another the homoerotic element of fascism. Halberstam draws upon a diverse range of theorists to interpret art installations, films, and photographs. In keeping with the subject matter, the book avoids sweeping unequivocal statements. Instead, arguments are nuanced without becoming too obtuse, for example:
At times I wasn’t sure whether I was enjoying the book sincerely or parodically, but it didn’t matter. Either way, this is a sublime sentence:
Another highlight is Halberstam’s vehement disagreement with Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Kung Fu Panda. My favourite part, however, was the analysis of the awful film Dude, Where’s My Car? which I have of course seen. Halberstam cheerfully acknowledges the possibility of creating non-existent depths in a stupid American comedy, then proceeds to discuss said comedy for more than ten pages. While the whole thing merits quotation, I’ll confine myself to this:
This reminded me of the time I was trapped in a boring seminar while caffeinated and wrote five pages on the ways in which the Fast and Furious franchise is an ongoing allegory for the War on Terror. Despite its depressingly corporate nature, academia is perhaps the only reasonable milieu to channel the perpetual over-analysis my brain would conduct anyway. I wouldn’t necessarily have given this book five stars had I read it at another time in my life. By sheer luck, I found it when especially receptive to a subversive and entertaining angle on academia and failure. If that’s your niche too, I definitely recommend ‘The Queer Art of Failure’.… (more)