RADAR Book Club With Jack Halberstam and The Queer Art of Failure

Doors 7:30 / Program at 8 $10

RADAR Book Club celebrates a new book each month by an author we love. Buy the book at discount in advance, read up and join the author for a performance and conversation!

December's Book Club is The Queer Art of Failure by Jack 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.

Buy The Queer Art of Failure at 40% off at Duke University Press. Enter RADAR at checkout!

Judith 'Jack' Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, as well as Female Masculinity and Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, both also published by Duke University Press.

With special guests Chris Vargas and Greg Youmans of Falling in Love . . . With Chris and Greg.

Falling in Love… is a situation comedy about a gay odd couple, one liberal, one radical; one transgendered, one not. They don't have a whole lot in common, but somehow they manage.

Chris Vargas is a film & video maker whose areas of interest include queer/transgender history, tabloid biography, and radical politics. In 2011, he earned his MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, where he currently teaches digital video production. His solo video work includes Have You Ever Seen a Transsexual Before? (2010) and Libéraceon (2011). With Eric Stanley he is the co-director of the movie Homotopia (2006), as well as its forthcoming feature-length sequel, Criminal Queers (2011).

Greg Youmans is a film scholar as well as a videomaker. He earned his Ph.D. from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he teaches in the Department of Film & Digital Media. His research explores the social and political role of queer cinemas during the 1970s. Arsenal Pulp Press has just published his book on the documentary Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (dir. Mariposa Film Group, 1977). He is now working on his next book, Moral Panic Media: Gay and Lesbian Filmmaking in the Time of Anita Bryant.

Hosted by Michelle Tea.