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Çuvallamanın Queer Sanatı (2013)

by J. Jack Halberstam(Favorite Author)

4.09 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Sel Yayıncılık

review 1: “Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (3). J. Jack Halberstam analyzes queer messages of failure and community in Pixar animated films, controversial art, and canonical works, including Toni Morrison's _Beloved_. Halberstam's central goals are to resist mastery (especially through investigating failure, forgetting, and stupidity), privilege these naïve or nonsensical structures, and suspect memorialization, which “advocate for certain forms of erasure over memory” (15). I appreciated Halberstam's accessible writing style and her taking serious films produced for children. In examining failure, Halberstam inte... morerrogates the separation between childhood and adulthood, finding that it “preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood” (3). Yet, Halberstam reminds us that not all applications of theory to products made for children are made equal. Halberstam critiques Zizek’s analysis of the 2008 Jack Black-voiced Kung Fu Panda, for he “uses popular culture with high theory not to unravel difficult arguments or to practice a nonelite pedagogy but only to keep insisting that we are all dupes of culture, misreaders of history, and brainwashed by contemporary politics, Zizek […] keeps trying to resurrect a model of political insurgency that depends upon the wisdom, the intellectual virtuosity, and the radical insight of, well, people like him” (174). Overall, I feel like this a wonderfully constructed work due to Halbertam's ability to navigate dense theory with popular works often not given a more than a second glance.
review 2: In this space/book, Halberstam is looking for ways to resist colonialism and the dominant order. She is specifically looking at some ways of being that are linked to each other and to queerness -- failure, losing, passivity, forgetting, unbeing, self-negation, and more. She follows threads of colonialism, optimism, kyriarchy and other poisons a long way through our tangled collective ideas, upending the hidden problematic elements of a lot of popular values, and explores new, unexpected ways to resist and refuse. While most of her starting points are not new to me, I found a lot of unexpected treasures by the time she stopped unpacking each theme.She eschews "high theory" and the pretense of objectivity in academia, while still providing an "academic" (for lack of a better word) level of complexity and detail in her thoughtful explorations. She doesn't try to meet any particular established standards of rigor here (even while presenting thorough research and effort), which serves her postmodernism-drenched points very well. Even her basic terms - like queerness or femininity - go without direct definitions. Instead their meanings flow from the intricate and shifting layers of collective meaning that Halberstam teases out. The reading is both dense and conversational. I found the book creative and inspiring, and I find myself seeing and seeking new paths to freedom and liberation from my own vantage point. less

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