speaking of catastrophic failure to live up to your own ideals
I’m reading the queer art of failure
there are some things I like about it and it’s a fun read but I think I’m interested in more…I dunno, positivist?…ways of rethinking failure
i.e. actually setting goals that we can fail at and accepting/celebrating that failure as the price of having real goals or being able to accept that we are often wrong*, rather than attempting to redefine our failures as successes — which is what at least half of the book is doing
I mean, how safe, how boring is that? that’s not embracing failure at all! that’s constantly moving the goalposts to avoid it
also the thing halberstam says about forgetfulness as the ideal way to explore alternative ways of being — through forgetting social norms and w/e I guess — is pretty silly/wrong
the most fruitful source of alternative ways of imagining the world I’ve found is history, remembering
if you forget, then you forget what life was like before capitalism, before patriarchy as we know it, before colonialism
there is no form of forgetting that is as complete an escape from current common-sense understandings of the world as an exploration of even very recent history
I am interested to know what you think, tumblr, but I swear to God, if someone says “ah, but maybe in being silly or wrong Halberstam is destabilising normative understandings of — ” I will delete your message before I get to the end of the sentence
*you could equally just call this “flexibility” or “risk-taking”, I guess?
