#halberstam

[fourdramas]

hm, i think a lot of the kink-discoursers on here could benefit from reading j. halberstams essay on homosexuality and fascism, “the killer in me is the killer in you”. halberstam asks the question why we cannot tolerate the linking of our desire to politics that disturb us and then comtemplates over this theme.

[theswordwizard]

j halberstam - the queer art of failure, “the anti-aesthetic of the lesbian”

[acosmic]

The monster, eventually, is no longer totalizing. The monstrous body that once represented everything is now represented as potentially meaning anything - it may be the outcast, the outlaw, the parasite, the pervert, the embodiment of uncontrollable sexual and violent urges, the foreigner, the misfit. The monster is all of these - but monstrosity has become a conspiracy of bodies rather than a singular form.

jack halberstam, skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters (1995).

from the introduction section, parasites and perverts, closing subsection the technology of monsters.

[shane-hollanders-freckles]

when u literally say “what the actual fuck” out loud in a library because one of your favorite critical theorists, jack halberstam, the author female masculinity and the queer art of failure, someone you have studied and discussed in your classes for years, is the visiting professor of a university that you want to apply to, like holy fucking shit.

[acosmic]

As we noted in relation to the lumpen body of the male monster, the monster’s body always is in a state of decomposition, it constantly threatens to unravel, to fail to hold together. In this scene deconstruction becomes a bloody act of violence, and a gendered violence at that.

jack halberstam on monsters and the death of the bride of frankenstein, from skin shows

[acosmic]

Within postmodern Gothic we are all of the devil's party. ... Within postmodern Gothic we no longer attempt to identify the monster and fix the terms of his / her deformity, rather postmodern Gothic warns us to be suspicious of monster hunters, monster makers, and above all, discourses invested in purity and innocence. The monster always represents the disruption of categories, the destruction of boundaries, and the presence of impurities, and so we need monsters and we need to recognize and celebrate our own monstrosities.

jack halberstam, skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters (1995).

from the introduction section, parasites and perverts, closing subsection the technology of monsters. small edits made for clarity.

[fourdramas]

“I believe that the erasure of the masculinist gay movement indicates an unwillingness to grapple with difficult historical antecedents and a desire to impose a certain kind of identity politics on history; in other words, the notion of a unified gay identity produces a universalizing and racially specific history of homosexuality stretching back through twentieth-century Europe and inscribed in avant-garde male modernism, but not in fascism.”

-J. Halberstam, the queer art of failure

[me-and-my-son-dingus]

“Because bodily flexibility has become both a commodity (in the case of cosmetic surgeries for example) and a form of commodification, it is not enough in this “age of flexibility” to celebrate gender flexibility as simply another sign of progress and liberation. Promoting flexibility at the level of identity and personal choices may sound like a postmodern or even a queer program for social change. But it as easily describes the advertising strategies of huge corporations like the Gap, who sell their products by casting their consumers as simultaneously all the same and all different…

Advertising by other companies, like Dr Pepper, whose ads extort the consumer to “be you!” and who sell transgression as individualism, also play with what could be called a “bad” reading of postmodern gender. Postmodern gender theory has largely been (wrongly) interpreted as both a description of and a call for greater degrees of flexibility and fluidity…

In other words, it has become commonplace and even cliched for young urban (white) gays and lesbians to claim that they do not like “labels” and do not want to be “pigeon holed” by identity categories, even as those same identity categories represent the activist labors of previous generations that brought us to the brink of “libration” in the first place…

As Lisa Duggan claims: “new neoliberal sexual politics... might be termed the new homonormativity - it is a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them while promising the possibility of a semobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption”...

Increased flexibility, as we know, leads to increased opportunities for the exploitation by transnational corporations of cheap labor markets in Third World nations and immigrant communities in the First World…

As many Marxist critics in particular seem to be fond of pointing out, identity politics in the late twentieth century has mutated in some cases from a necessary and strategic critique of universalism into a stymied and myopic politics of the self.”

- Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place