Jack Halberstam

This practice-based doctoral research explores the nature of the feral, as manifested in an object-based installation practice of contemporary art that scavenges - physically, socially and metaphorically - in the gap between defined spaces. My conception of the feral draws out the political promise of this indeterminacy: the state of being partly wild and partly civilised. The page is also constructed materially, as a space where
heterogeneous elements meet: different voices expressed through the writing and images of my practice.

In claiming the feral as a critical concept, I reject its more common, derogatory, usage. In particular, during the 2011 London riots, the former British Lord Chancellor Kenneth Clarke labelled the rioters a “feral
underclass”, seeking to fix them in this uncivilised, abject position. I unfix this separation, through a feral interpretation of my objects, as they interpenetrate domestic, institutional, and civilised public spheres.
Mother’s milk solidifies as plaster-filled condom bombs, at once phallic and breast-like, poised to ignite a pyre of social theory texts in a gallery project space, a former factory; haphazard conglomerations of plant matter and urban debris are strung together in bunting on an inner-city community hall.

The feral becomes here a rival concept to Julia Kristeva’s formulation of abjection, as the seeping bodily organs evoked by my objects are not defined in terms of the individual, but reflected on through the formless
mass of the social body, the displaced undercommons of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the wild of Jack Halberstam, the rioters of Joshua Clover.
The feral has an antagonistic quality, but it cannot fit the relational models of art put forward by Chantal Mouffe and Claire Bishop that seek to civilise this antagonism. Neither can the positivity of Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman new materialism extract the hybridity of materials I use from the precariousness of the social conditions from which they are drawn. My practice, like the feral, resists these separations.

Em tempos da prática do coaching e quando notícias distópicas tomam as manchetes, qual a importância de um livro sobre o fracasso? E mais: um livro que parte da pergunta do que poderia surgir depois da esperança, depois da terra arrasada? É com atraso de quase uma década que chega ao Brasil esse trabalho fundamental para os estudos queer e também a obra-prima do teórico norte-americano Jack Halberstam. A arte queer do fracasso investiga alternativas e rotas de fuga numa sociedade fascinada por uma ideia heteronormativa de sucesso. Por uma ideia capitalista de sucesso. Os objetos de investigação de Halberstam para desconstruir essas prerrogativas são os mais diversos. Ele parte de animações como Bob Esponja, Toy Story e filmes de apelo popular, como Cara, cadê meu carro?, passando ainda por Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, W. G. Sebald e pelas imagens eróticas de Tom of Finland. Parece que nada escapa ao seu desejo de nos fazer enxergar a rigidez das normas do capitalismo ao redor. A edição da Cepe Editora tem tradução de Bhuvi LIbanio.

Queer theory describes a network of critiques emerging from a legacy of activism and looking ahead to utopian futures. The analytical tools queer theory provides as a mode of close reading and critique makes it a relevant contemporary approach to literary theory. Beyond reading for queer characters and desires in texts, queer theory is a tool for seeing below the superficial, and supporting unconventional readings that deconstruct normative assumptions. The activist roots of queer theory in the 1969 Stonewall Riots places drag, trans issues, class, race, violence, gender, and sexuality at the heart of queer theorizing. Subsequent work engages topics such as temporality, ecology, geography, and diaspora through the analysis of culture and politics, but also literature, film, music, and other media. Queer theory attends to both the rhetorical power of language and the broader structures of knowledge formulation. As feminist epistemology asks whose knowledge matters and who creates knowledge, queer theory asks whether knowledge matters and whether naturalized knowledge is constructed. Textual or discursive construction of knowledge is a key theoretical approach of queer theory with important implications for literature. Queer theory embraces a multidisciplinary and diverse set of influences, methodologies, questions, and formats. The critiques can be applied to help deconstruct naturalized epistemic frameworks around topics notably including, language, gender, sexuality, history, the subject, universality, the environment, animals, borders, space, time, norms, ideals, reproduction, utopia, love, the home, the nation, and power. Queer theory empowers novel readings of the world, and worldly readings of the novel, opening up new ways of viewing life and text.

This article aims to update generally assumed readings on Spanish bailaor Israel Galván regarding solitude (Didi-Huberman) and silence (Frayssinet Savy) by interrogating his show "La fiesta" (2017). "La fiesta" contributes to a revaluation of his solo career as a flamenco dancer and deliberately proposes a non-normative flamenco universe that searches for alternative modes of dancing. Moved by notions such as failure, forgetfulness, and stupidity (Halberstam) I will demonstrate how celebratory spaces and times such as the one evoked by Galván facilitate actions and movements outside of the limits normativity imposes.

This article examines Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa’s novel Duerme (1994). The narrator-protagonist, Claire, occupies various racial, social, and gendered identities throughout—both by choice and by obligation. Barthes’s notion of pleasure in The Pleasure of the Text suggests a productive reading of Duerme as a text that remains rooted in culture while unsettling the reader’s relationship to that culture, and thus to language and to history. This reading of Claire’s refusal of normalized behavior interrogates colonial social structures while also serving as a broader metaphor for a successful revolution in contemporary Mexico.

"Twisted feet, snapped heads, jarring, abrupt movements, rhythmic stomping and trembling. In the end, death by exhaustion, the staged sacrifice for the heathen sun god. Dancing – excessive, powerful, disturbing.

The premiere of “Le Sacre du Printemps” at the Parisian Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 29 May 1913 shocked audiences. Vaslav Nijinsky’s choreography and Igor Stravinsky’s music created one of the greatest scandals in 20th-century dance history. Performed on the eve of World War I, the ballet uncannily foreshadowed the slaughter on the battlefields: “Le Sacre du Printemps” – a dance over trenches.

One hundred years later, an international and interdisciplinary conference has addressed the special role that “Le Sacre du Printemps” played in dance modernity and as a cultural-historical phenomenon. The debate focused on the aspects of victims and sacrifice, the relationship between abstraction and ornamentation, and the peculiar interweave of modernism and primitivism. What exactly caused the uproar at the premiere in 1913 and what relevance does the piece have today?

More than 500 visitors participated in debates and discussions, and over 2,000 people watched the performances staged at RADIALSYSTEM V and the HAU Hebbel am Ufer theatre. One of the artistic highlights of the congress was the reconstruction of Mary Wigman’s “The Rite of Spring” (1957), performed by the dance ensembles at the theatres in Osnabrück und Bielefeld. Another highlight was “The Autumn of Le Sacre du Printemps”, a reconstruction of Nijinsky’s choreography performed by Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer together with 20 members of the Sasha Waltz & Guests dance company. The scenographer Detlef Weitz and artist Dominique Müller presented a video installation created especially for the congress, featuring clips of various performances of “The Rite of Spring”. Earlier this year, the HAU Hebbel am Ufer launched an open call for treatments of the “Rite of Spring” by young choreographers. A selection of these contemporary approaches to the “Dance over Trenches” was presented at the congress.

With: Jan Assmann, Gabriele Brandstetter, Laurent Chétouane, deufert&plischke, Christine Gaigg, Lynn Garafola, Jack Halberstam, Millicent Hodson, Stephanie Jordan, Herfried Münkler, Sasha Waltz, Sigrid Weigel and others."

The title of this chapter might, at first sight, seem perplexing. After all, what does Lady Gaga, a modern Italian-American pop singer, have to do with Jane Austen, a British novelist from the Regency period? I am borrowing the first half of my title from Jack Halberstam's book Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012). There Halberstam argues that pop star Lady Gaga functions as an avatar for a new kind of feminism, 'a sign of a new world of disorder', in the twenty-first century (xii). Lady Gaga's outlandish performances, free rhythms and lyrics and eccentric outfits, Halberstam continues, push cultural boundaries, pointing to wider sociocultural changes in the West (137). Halberstam uses the terms 'gaga' and 'going gaga' in the sense of going crazy, becoming wild, anarchic and out of control. He notes that the word 'gaga' precedes Lady Gaga herself and has similar sensibilities as the word 'queer', in that both evoke the spirit of anarchy and allude to an anti-normative world order-or rather disorder (6). My use of the term 'gaga' in this chapter departs slightly from Halberstam: I am first evoking Lady Gaga as diva and cult figure to argue that in the late 2010s and early 2020s Austen has entered the world of celebrity. Austen has become a celebrity idol to whom we expect round-the-clock access-as we do to Lady Gaga, Beyoncé and other notables of their generation. Yet some of Halberstam's meaning of gaga as the outrageous and preposterous also applies-for instance, one Austen event I analyse below invited fans to re-enact the pond scene from the BBC Pride and Prejudice (1995) in their backyard. Halberstam's sense of gaga as something culturally wild, anarchic and excessive is present in the recent Austen events and popular manifestations that I examine in this chapter. I am proposing a Gaga Austen: as celebrity, brand and object of endless scrutiny, contemporary Austen is going gaga. The sources I use for my examination of Gaga Austen are exhibitions, events and online platforms from the 2010s, many of which were part of the 200th anniversary celebrations of Austen's death in 2017. They include the exhibitions Which Jane Austen? at the Bodleian Library, Oxford (June-October 2017), which presented Austen as war novelist and savvy businesswoman; and Jane Austen by the Sea at the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (June 2017-January 2018), which explored Austen's connection with coastal towns. Other sources are the Austen wax figure unveiled in 2014 (The Austen Centre, Bath), and Chawton House's fundraising campaign Reimagining Jane Austen's 'Great House', which aims to save the manor house belonging to Austen's brother Edward. Recent e-spaces also receive attention: the project Reading with Austen (launched in 2018) recreates Edward Austen Knight's library at Godmersham, and What Jane Saw (launched in 2013) reconstructs the London art gallery Austen visited, or might have visited, in 1796 and 1813. The instability and

The contemporary turn towards 'wildness' and 'rewilding' seeks an intimacy and bewilderment of subjecthood. While wildness as a western concept has very problematic histories, in its reclaimed usage, Halberstam and Nyong'o argue that it can also enact an 'anarrangement' of normalised boundaries and categories. Gordon Pask's 1957 chemical computing experiment that spontaneously grew an ear in response to environmental stimulus poses similar questions about the relational volition of matter, confronting not only the artist or scientist's control of their research, but the fundamentally colonial notion of a world composed of discrete parts. This article engages with a critical reading of Halberstam and Nyong'o's writing to propose parallels between their conception of the wild and the science of self-organisation, both of which engage in aspects of decolonial critique through a troubling of the colonial mindset that separates in order to maintain mastery. Pask's experiment suggests the possibility of alternative discourses and practices that emphasise an ethics of relation through techniques of wilding.

A que pode nos interessar um livro sobre o fracasso quando o desencanto e a desesperança parecem atingir muitos de nós? Talvez para não só entender e menos ainda aceitar quando fracassamos, mas tentar viver depois do fracasso. O lançamento no Brasil de A arte queer do fracasso, primeiro livro de Jack Halberstam traduzido para o português, é a oportunidade de conhecer um dos autores mais peculiares e influentes na relação entre os estudos queer, os estudos trans e o debate sobre a cultura e a arte nos Estados Unidos. Atualmente, Jack Halbertam é professor titular no Departamento de Inglês e diretor do Instituto de Pesquisa sobre Mulheres, Gênero e Sexualidade na Universidade de Columbia em Nova Iorque.

(Published in International Political Sociology).

The concept of ontological security has received increased attention in the security studies literature over the past ten years. This article develops a critical perspective towards ontological security and its mobilisation by IR scholars, arguing that substantive ethical and political resources are produced by resisting the terms of ontological security/insecurity. It argues that the aspiration to ontological security, to contiguous and stable narratives of selfhood, can (violently) obscure the ways in which such narratives are themselves implicated in power relations. Furthermore it argues that attempts to order political life into an ontological/security episteme disciplines or marginalises modes of subjectivity which resist the closure of ontological security-seeking strategies. The article engages queer figurations of subjectivity as mobilised by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Jack Halberstam, as well as examples from anti-militarist social movements, to demonstrate traditions which refuse and resist the framework of ontological security. It does this both in order to highlight particular practices and strategies that are written out by an epistemology oriented around ontological security/insecurity, and to show how a resistance to such ordering can enliven political action in various ways.

Ideology is an integral component in the reproduction of power. Integral to this central tenet of statecraft is the regulation of identity and proscribed methods of social engagement—positive portrayals of “good citizenry” and delegitimized representations of those challenging hegemony. Through an Althusserian and linguistic analysis, positioning the X-Men movie franchise as an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), one can examine the lives of mutants portrayed in the text as indicative of preferred methods of statelegitimized sociopolitical interaction. This metaphorical and textual analysis is used to discuss the lived realities of queer persons resisting hegemony, and is located in the bodies and performances of those who resist assimilation and homonormativity and who challenge reformist LGBT organizations seeking rights for non-heterosexuals through further entanglement with the state. I explore the world of mutants and queers with the following question in mind: How can one utilize a queerly theoretical analytical lens while maintaining a discernable distance from reformism, homonormativity, and assimilationist reductionism? Both the fictional world of the X-Men and the lived queer reality reflect the state’s efforts to dictate the borders of citizenry, the expression of grievance, and the performance of deviance, difference and stigma. Whereas the mutant narrative reflects statist ideals of a neoliberal, “politically correct” politics of integration, this agenda conceals an insidious denial of queer identity through the coerced conformity of “deviant” bodies. This discourse will be discussed through a variety of locales, including the performativity of gender and sexuality, the narrative of racial deviance, and the discussion of “passing.”

First we try to stablish a dialogue about affects
between Deleuze´s and Guattari´s ideas and queer
studies; Deleuze and Guattari clearly states the
connection between affect and art. On the other
side some recent works close to queer studies at the
Anglophone world use the expression affect without
a further development. Then we propose that this
dialogue should find a stimulating response by a
genealogy of Latin American intellectual production
based on artifice, giving special emphasis on camp.
As a way of trying to approach both perspectives at
a an analysis of Song of Autumn (2014) by André
Antônio Barbosa through a second way of translating
artifice: dandyism.

O livro, resultado uma pesquisa financiada pela Capes e executada durante o período (2019-2020) em que o autor foi professor visitante na Universidade de Sevilha, analisa exposições que estiveram em cartaz em museus nas cidades de Madri, Barcelona, Valência e Sevilha. Todas as mostras selecionadas (de David Wojnarowicz e Henrik Olesen, no Museu Reina Sofia, Feminismos, no Centro de Cultura Contemporânea de Barcelona, Tiempos convulsos, no Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderna, The Richard Channin Foudation e Nosotras, de nuevo, no Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporânea, e Pink power, de Verónica Ruth Frías, no Instituto da Cultura e das Artes de Sevilha) reuniam obras que tratavam sobre diversidade e/ou dissidência sexual e de gênero. Além de artistas que integram essas exposições, o livro também analisa obras de José Pérez Ocaña e Abel Azcona.

A partir de algumas obras presentes nessas exposições, em diálogo com uma série de estudos realizados por outros/as pesquisadores/as, Leandro Colling oferece sua contribuição para pensar e problematizar, por exemplo, a distinção entre performance de gênero e performatividade de gênero com a qual Judith Butler (2003, 2002) opera em sua obra. O autor discute textos da filósofa com obras artísticas e acadêmicas, como as realizadas por Josete Féral (2015) e Matteo Bonfitto (2013), por exemplo, para evidenciar a dificuldade de diferenciar rigidamente performance de gênero e performatividade de gênero.
Outro aspecto importante do livro trata sobre as críticas que o autor realiza à teoria antissocial e da negatividade que alguns importantes pesquisadores utilizam e desenvolvem para analisar determinadas obras artísticas. Essa teoria aparece, por exemplo, na chave de leitura do fracasso, da negatividade e da infelicidade, desenvolvidas por pesquisadores/as como Lee Edelman (2004), Jack Halberstam (2018) e Sara Ahmed (2019). O autor contrapõe essas obras e as critica através das reflexões de José Esteban Muñoz (2020) em torno da utopia queer por vir e, novamente, aciona uma série de artistas que estavam expondo obras nos museus da Espanha.

Dessa maneira, o autor, em diálogo com a conhecida obra de Michel Foucault (1998), evidencia como, ao mesmo tempo em que em se amplia a “vontade de expor” obras artísticas sobre gênero e sexualidade nos museus, também se mantém a vontade de categorizar, mesmo quando artistas e pesquisadores/as se dizem influenciados/as por perspectivas teóricas que, historicamente, tiveram como proposta principal criticar as categorizações, os binarismos e dicotomias, a exemplo dos estudos queer, uma das principais influências no pensamento do autor.

A “fúria categorizante” não atinge apenas curadores/as e pesquisadores/as mas também alguns artistas, como revela a pesquisa ao fazer uma ampla análise da exposição de Henrik Olesen, o que motivou o autor a realizar uma densa reflexão sobre o anacronismo na história da arte, recorrendo, por exemplo, a autores como Jacques Rancière (2011) e Georges Didi-Huberman (2010, 2013), entre outros/as.
Além disso, o livro foi escrito de uma forma diferenciada. Inspirado em obras como as de Berenice Bento (2016), Andrea Zanella (2017) e Janaina Fontes Leite (2017), a ideia do autor foi a de produzir um exercício cartográfico e etnográfico para que o leitor acompanhe e conheça todo o processo de construção da obra. Assim como em muitas obras da arte contemporânea foi, e em muitos casos ainda é, importante o processo, no livro A vontade de expor também é possível conhecer como a pesquisa foi realizada. Para isso, em determinados momentos o autor relata como chegou em cada uma das cidades, como descobriu as exposições, que temas elas o motivaram a ler e pesquisar, de que modo as obras o afetaram, no sentido de Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari (1993). Para evidenciar que “a vontade de expor” não se limita aos museus, o autor ainda apresenta, ao longo do livro, uma série de outras produções artísticas (teatro, cinema, dança, canto e performance) que ele consumiu paralelamente no período da pesquisa.

Ao final da obra, o autor conclui que a pesquisa foi produzida por aquilo que ele nomeou por Afetos Performativos Utópicos e Dissidentes (APUDs) capazes de ressignificar a pulsão de morte, o fracasso ou a infelicidade e produzir resistências. Em resumo, trata-se de um livro que apresenta contribuições teóricas ao campo de pesquisa interdisciplinar em arte, gênero e sexualidade, abre possibilidades de investigações futuras e, ao mesmo tempo, estranha as formas tradicionais de escrever livros acadêmicos em nossas universidades.

Algorithmic modes of thought have long and problematic histories of collusion in processes of governmentality, dating at least back to the Atlantic slave trade and including the othering of neurodiverse, black and indigenous, and queer cultures. But beyond their instrumentation within systems of power, this paper proposes that at the foundation level of algorithmic design there are a series of assumptions about what constitutes legitimate thought processes. These assumptions are based on neurotypical modes of thought and often ignore the possibilities of more neurodiverse thinking, which is regularly devalued in our society. This naturalised "whiteness" that lies at the centre of and colonises algorithmic programming needs to be interrogated and rethought, it is argued, in order to break the relationships between algorithms and oppressive power systems. Drawing on fugitive and devalued modes of thought such as queer kinship and failure, black sociality and the incomputability at the heart of the mathematical concept of Omega, the article speculates on the conception of a minor algorithmic value or "life" closer to that of an emergent collective and ecological consciousness than that of the dominant individualised and fixed model that is valued within contemporary capitalism.

Alexander Schwan geht in seinem Beitrag über Igor Stravinskys Ballett »Le Sacre du Printemps« der Frage nach, inwieweit sich in Vaslav Nijinskys legendärer Choreographie der Uraufführung das primitivistische Konstrukt einer archaischen Vergangenheit mit Elementen der Avantgarde-Ästhetik verbindet. Ausgehend von Jacques Rivières im November 1913 publiziertem Essay über das Ballett, den Schwan als Manifest des Modernismus im Tanz liest, rekonstruiert der Beitrag Nijinskys innovativen Umgang mit dem Ornament, stellt Bezüge zwischen der geometrisch-angularen Formensprache seiner Choreographie und der zeitgenössischen Architektur (Adolf Loos) sowie Anthropologie (Cesare Lombroso) her und deutet das Gesamtkonzept Nijinskys als offensive Absage an traditionelle Ideale tänzerischer Grazie und Schönheit. Der im Zeichen des Primitivismus stehende ästhetische Normbruch bringt so auf subversive Weise das Kunstverständnis der Pariser Homosexuellenszene der 1910er Jahre zur Geltung.

Tradução do Prefácio, feito por Jack Halberstam, do livro Countersexual Manifesto de Paul Preciado, lançado pela Critical Life Studies em 2018.

Essa é uma tradução sem fins lucrativos, cujo únicos anseios são a distribuição e a circulação de textos acadêmicos não-hegemônicos, na língua portuguesa

Queer Theory emerged from departments of literature, film, rhetoric, and critical studies in universities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe during the early 1990s, exemplified and inspired by the publication of two paradigm-shifting books: Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Butler 1990) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick 2008) (both cited under Theory). Drawing upon the social constructionist views prominent in the work of French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault, Butler argued that gender is neither a natural nor a stable element of biological or social identity, but rather is constantly brought into existence through a series of performative activities: everyday gestures and actions that have the potential to reconstitute notions and practices of masculinity and femininity and thus resist normativity. Sedgwick similarly attacked foundational models of sexual identity, exploring the closet as mor...

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently “minimalist” work in fact deployed “underground” strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply “overwrite” Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilized the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

The article is an analysis of film series about Minions, treated as a fairytale representation of the working class. The animated series analyzed is based on such paradoxes as the visibility of the working class (but on limited principles); the use of a class language and a naturalized inability to promote; the extraction of the homosocial desire of Minions and its ban; the presentation of capitalism as a slavery system and its praise. Minions would be a testimony to fear of social change and late response. The author also seeks to answer the question about the reason why such working-class performances are directed to children.

Queer experience is often characterized as a failure to conform to norms and expectations. In this talk, we will ask the question: What is failure? Can we think beyond the success/failure opposition? This will also be the occasion to reflect on “queer theory”, and on its relationship to its own success and failure as a discipline. What are the borders, the objects, and the territories of “queer theory”? Does “queer theory” fail at providing these requirements attached to disciplinarity? Can “queer theory” succeed beyond failure?

My contact with the Brazilian generation who have been releasing their first feature films during the course of the twenty‐first century proved decisive for me during the Tiradentes Exhibition, which is one of Brazil's most important film festivals, which I first attended in 2009. I chose to go along above all in order to attend the pre‐screenings of A Fuga da Mulher Gorila/The Escape of the Female Gorilla (2009), directed by Felipe Bragança and Marina Meliande, and No Meu Lugar/In my Place (2009), directed by Eduardo Valente. I'd already heard about the changes that had taken place at the Tiradentes Exhibition as a result of Cléber Eduardo's curatorship. During the week I spent at Tiradentes I was absorbed by the debates which transcended the customary rather monotonous discussions about the creative process and the bitter experience of production which in the past had driven me away from this type of event at exhibitions and festivals. More than the discussions in themselves or any film in particular, though, what aroused my curiosity was the atmosphere at the exhibition – the desire to make a new type of cinema. No, it was no longer simply the gesture of self‐affirmation to do something after the cultural dismantlement brought about by President Fernando Collor de Mello in 1990–1992 which brought the Brazilian film industry to its knees such that it hardly produced any more full‐length feature films.  And it wasn't anything like the film-makers of the cinema da retomada (a new type of national cinema), such as Carla Camurati, Walter Salles, and Fernando Meirelles, who came on the scene at the end of the 1990s. No, this was a brand new Brazilian cinema – garage cinema – and it expressed a completely different space.  that it hardly produced any more full‐length feature films.2 And it wasn’t anything like the film- makers of the cinema da retomada (a new type of national cinema), such as Carla Camurati, Walter Salles, and Fernando Meirelles, who came on the scene at the end of the 1990s.3 No, this was a brand new Brazilian cinema – garage cinema – and it expressed a completely different space. Indeed, garage cinema has allowed me to reconnect with Brazilian cinema in a way that had only happenedfor me once before with the postmodern or neon‐realist cinema of the 1980s.4 At that time the dictatorship was coming to an end. Indeed, when I went to university in 1984, I came across those urban films that were not intimidated by genre cinema and had come a long way since cinema novo,5 and they made me feel like I belonged existentially to the films being made in Brazil at that time. This was not because of any reverence I might have had for the films themselves or because of their historical significance – in relation to the past – but because I felt they just were the sort of films I would have made if I had been a filmmaker.
I returned to the Tiradentes Exhibition in 2010 when I was invited to take part as a jury member. The prize for Best Film was awarded to Estrada para Ythaca/Road to Ythaca (2010), directed by Luiz Pretti, Ricardo Pretti, Pedro Diógenes, and Guto Parente, and the fascination returned – but now there was a whole new set of questions. Yes, it was a lot easier now than in the past to make films with a group of friends, even without raising financing for production and post‐production. Alongside the prize for Best Film I should also mention the significance of the prize awarded to O Céu sobre os Ombros/The Sky Above (2010) directed by Sérgio Borges, at the Brasilia Festival, also in 2010, along with the national as well as international splash caused by O Som ao Redor/Neighbouring Sounds (2012), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho. But what were the aims of these films? What I saw spoke of an impasse which simply became more and more pronounced.
Fast‐forward a few years and those rookie filmmakers were no longer the newcomers. And what do you do when you are no longer a promising young filmmaker? The critic and writer Silviano Santiago once told me in a conversation that the contemporary Brazilian artist has to choose between failure, success, or the fringe.6 If I remember correctly, in Santiago’s opinion, failure meant being an independent artist, success meant working in the media, above all in TV, and the fringe meant a university job. Of course none of those choices came, or indeed come, with ready‐made values; they simply express the ethical dilemmas that each artist has to face up to even if it is a case of deciding in the darkness of his room whether he will keep plugging away at it or throw in the towel. Perhaps these dilemmas should be understood not as permanent choices or what each artist might judge as success or failure but rather as the way in which society constructs the artist and positions him within that society. That is, it is more a question of how the artist is perceived by Brazilian society nowadays. Brazilian society is, after all, distinguished by a cult of celebrity, a concentration of large entertain- ment conglomerates as well as a proliferation of alternative production and distribution outlets.
Failure as an ethical and aesthetic attitude could be seen as a key to unlock the meaning of not only Estrada para Ythaca but a number of Brazil’s first‐feature films made in the years since 2010, which have been grouped together under the rubric of garage cinema (Ikeda and Lima 2011, 2012) or post‐industrial cinema (Migliorin 2011) – to this day the secondary literature on this film movement is still sparse, consisting of a sprinkling of short newspaper reviews and a few Master’s dissertations. Radically different from the cinema da retomada of the second half of the 1990s, which sought to reach a large audience by achieving a pragmatic balance between genre‐based cinema and high‐quality production values,7 garage cinema seeks to create an alternative dramaturgy and staging based on reduced production costs by using digital supports and by relying on alternative distribution outlets – based on an increased use of festivals, exhibitions, and cineclubs – rather than the large distribution networks which have a reduced number of film releases and are dominated by North American blockbusters or Brazilian comedies. It is more than simply a change in production methods or a change in the make‐up of the teams – professionals are now chosen from various regions in Brazil. Garage cinema seeks to recuperate the collective as a way of life which needs to be better understood within the film world (Migliorin 2012). Offering a counterpoint to programmes which are focused on individual auteurs,8 the search for collective experiences on the modern stage is as old as the avant‐garde (see Bishop 2012), which itself sought to integrate participative, collaborative, and relational proposals into its art forms (Bourriaud 2002). It is a programme which is present, indeed, in Brazil’s diverse languages, and it has been explored in greater depth in the fields of the visual arts, thea- tre, and performance rather than in film. Despite the experience of many filmmakers who have collaborated on each other’s film projects – and this has been common in Brazil since at least the days of cinema novo – it is true to say that when Estrada para Ythaca was released what caught everyone’s attention was the breaking down of hierarchies and the fact that the four directors were present during the filming and making of the film, and even played their part as actors and performers in the film.

In 2012 two North American independent films were released that featured female protagonists carrying out surgical procedures in contemporary interpretations of the mad-doctor horror subgenre. This chapter will explore the potential of these films to challenge issues of control and heteronormativity in contemporary sex and society, arguing that the depiction of women as surgeons in these works allows for a dissection of white, male, middle-class values. It will explore what happens when women pick up the surgical scalpel and begin to penetrate instead of being penetrated, asking whether this act still operates within a heteronormative structural logic, or allows for a potential queer interpretation of the penetrating female protagonist.
  Pauline in Richard Bates Jr.’s Excision (2012) and Mary in Jen and Sylvia Soska’s American Mary (2012) are two very different characters; one is a teenage outsider with an unconventional surgery and blood fetish in a sexually repressed middle-class suburban town, whilst the other is a rape victim and medical student in a world of prostitution, strip clubs and body modification. However, both Pauline and Mary’s use of surgery can be read as a search for control over their lives; that through exploring and manipulating the human body, these two women seek to comprehend their position within a society that constantly alienates them.
  This chapter will demonstrate how the introduction of the female surgeon necessitates a move on from previous scholarly work on the mad-doctor subgenre, due to the shift away from a heteronormative structural logic. Instead it will position Pauline and Mary within the debates on gender and sexuality that are critical to Third Wave feminism. Building on the work of Jack Halberstam, it will explore the representation of violence, control and desire in these films, and question whether the actions of these women could be seen to present a fissure in the patriarchal heterosexual system.

An extract taken from an exhibition piece entitled 'Re-imagining the Gothic', presented as part of Sheffield University's 2016 conference, ‘monsters & monstrosities’.

For many, the gothic draws on moments of pivot between power, restriction and uncertainty. Interestingly, it is these self-same themes that have formed such a strong presence within the worlds of fashion design throughout the centuries, whether that be through the indication of riding prowess found in a man’s heeled shoe, the liberty of a woman’s trouser, the constraint of corsetry, the dehumanisation of a prison uniform, or the impractical finery of a macaroni.

The Catalogue of Haute Couture sonnet sequence, with its use of traditional balladic symbolism, re-imagines the manner in which clothing once served as an integral means for the discussion of taboos and for the demonstration of changing emotions and class statuses, combining manufactured garb with fragments of a constrained natural world. The uncertainty and defamiliarisation of the familiar so commonly found in gothic fiction has ever underpinned ‘style’, in which the individual makes choices that may reveal or disguise status, ability, personality et c. to thus categorise their self in their own eyes and in the eyes of others.

In this essay, I reexamine Yvonne Rainer and Steve Paxton's 1963 dance Word Words, arguing that this apparently 'minimalist' work in fact deployed 'underground' strategies, those of female (and male) impersonation. Camp performance, an approach that Rainer soon disavowed, allowed Word Words to explore gender in ways that were not possible by the time Rainer developed Trio A. Word Words did not simply 'overwrite' Rainer's (female) gender, as has been suggested alongside similar discussions of Trio A and gender, but destabilised the gender system's binaries: a deeply radical move, even in the context of other Judson performances using camp.

In this chapter, I explore some of the strategies of addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness. Based on 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in central Texas, 10 interviews with service providers, and 40 interviews with LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness, I examine what does success mean for LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness and people trying to assist them, what does failure to achieve success do, and what is the role of happiness and homonormativity in all of these things. I utilize Sara Ahmed’s and J. Halberstam’s theories in order to explicate how success, failure, and notions of happiness shape homonormative strategies in addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness. I specifically investigate discourses around failure and family rejection, rehabilitative framings that construct homelessness as a personal failure, and solutions surrounding success and happiness that some youth internalize. Through this examination, I show how these strategies and solutions potentially further the marginalization of LGBTQ youth experiencing homelessness. I briefly end the chapter thinking through some alternative queer solutions to addressing LGBTQ youth homelessness.

Alain Guiraudie’s internationally acclaimed film L’Inconnu du lac (2013) is a tale of murder at a gay cruising beach. The film’s protagonist Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps) lusts after the eponymous “stranger” Michel (Christophe Paou) until one night Franck accidentally witnesses Michel drown his boyfriend. Franck, however, opts to repress what he has seen in order to continue wooing Michel, privileging his desire over the fear of a similar fate. The murder does not deter any of the regulars from attending the cruising spot, and indeed seems to generate and reinvigorate modes of communication and erotic encounter between the men. In my paper, I will explore how Guiraudie constructs modes of queer community and kinship upon and alongside death, murder, and contagion. Further, I will argue that the film founds queer community through instances of sacrifice that open queerness to new economies of expression.

Grounding theories of queerness in logics of negativity is nothing new. Works such as Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004) are paradigmatic of queer theory’s so-called “antisocial thesis” which roots queer specificity in anti-futurity and death. These theories, however, negating all (hetero-)normative structures and forms of sociality, can tend to leave us hanging with regards to actually imagining alternative forms of community. As a result, the antisocial thesis can seem to stagnate, much like the film’s cruising spot itself which, at the beginning of the film, inhabits a somewhat stale nostalgia of queer life beside the unmoving waters of the lake: the men seem bored and disaffected, sex has lost its kick, and communication happens across codified gestures within a policed environment. I propose to reread the film, and assumptions of queer negativity, alongside the philosophies of Georges Bataille and Catherine Malabou. I will look at Bataille’s theory of (human) sacrifice as a foundational moment of community, and Malabou’s theory of plasticity as a way of thinking how negativity can create new material forms rather than simply negating pre-existing ones. L’Inconnu du lac, I argue, stages within sacrifice a reopening of communication within queer community which, plastic and monstrous, will begin to change form.

Queer and Subjugated Knowledges: Generating Subversive Imaginaries makes an invaluable contribution to gender and sexuality studies, engaging with queer theory to reconceptualize everyday interactions. The scholars in this book respond to J. Halberstam’s call to engage in alternative imaginings to reconceptualize forms of being, the production of knowledge, and envisage a world with different sites for justice and injustice. The recent work of cultural theorist, Judith Halberstam, makes new investments in the notion of the counter-hegemonic, the subversive and the alternative. For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory. Working across Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Performance Studies, Television and Media Studies, Animation, Sociology, History, Social Policy, Childhood Studies, Education, and Cultural Geography, this unique interdisciplinary text aimed at academics, undergraduate and postgraduate students provides challenging new frameworks for generating knowledge.

Resumo | O texto aponta as diferenças entre as ideias de arte queer do fracasso (Jack Halberstam) e utopia queer (José Esteban Muñoz) situando-as em relação à "teoria antissocial" dos estudos queer. Por fim, aposta na resistência como possibilidade de pensar determinadas produções da cena artística das dissidências sexuais e de gênero do Brasil da atualidade. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: Fracasso, utopia queer, resistência. Failure, queer utopia or resistance? Reading keys for thinking about the arts of sexual and gender dissidences in Brazil Abstract | The text points out differences between the ideas of queer art of failure (Jack Halberstam) and queer utopia (José Esteban Muñoz) placing them in relation to the "antisocial theory" of queer studies. Finally, the article focuses on the resistance and ability to think about certain productions in the artistic scene of sexual and gender dissidences in Brazil today.

Kathryn Bond Stockton’s concept of ‘growing sideways’ rejects notions of development that map the path to adulthood by advancement into prominently or exclusively heterosexual behaviours. She poses instead a queer temporality that values forms of horizontal development. In light of this concept, how do queer artists explore and articulate such sideways development against a general culture that privileges  narratives of teleological heterosexuality?

My paper addresses how such artists construct narratives (or anti-narratives) of identity by adapting or responding to existing texts and assembling asynchronous bricolages that resist traditional notions of time and maturation. It highlights prominent examples in which elements of existing texts (such as Shakespeare, Peter Pan, the cinema that informs the Rocky Horror Picture Show) are decontextualised and rewrought into queer identities, and how this process allows for sideways development. In doing so, I hope to better illuminate some of the methods by which queer artists have shaped and will continue to shape radical notions of selfhood.

I focus particularly on the reappropriation of images of childhood, androgyny, and presexuality, and how these are utilised to articulate what J. Halberstam calls ‘the stretched-out adolescences of queer culture’ via the infinite yet unlived, yet ungendered identities those images of delayed adulthood offer.

In 2012 two North American independent films were released that featured female protagonists carrying out surgical procedures in contemporary interpretations of the ‘mad-doctor’ horror subgenre. This paper will explore the potential of these films to challenge issues of control in patriarchal and heteronormative sex and society, arguing that the depiction of women as surgeons allows for a dissection of white, male, middle-class values. Pauline in Richard Bates Jr.’s “Excision” (2012) and Mary in Jen and Sylvia Soska’s “American Mary” (2012) are two very different characters; one is a teenage outsider with an unconventional surgery and blood fetish in a sexually repressed middle-class suburban town, whilst the other is a rape victim and medical student in a world of prostitution, strip clubs and body modification. However, both Pauline and Mary’s use of surgery can be read as a search for control over their lives; that through exploring and manipulating the human body, these two women seek to comprehend their position within a society that constantly alienates them.
  Through a critical engagement with Robert Jensen’s radical feminist essay “Patriarchal Sex”, this paper will explore the role of violence and control in the depiction of sex and sexual pleasure in these films as a fissure in the patriarchal heterosexual system, therefore providing a reading that is positioned at the boundaries of queer film theory. It will discuss these two female leading characters from a feminist perspective, questioning their representation and the films’ portrayal of sexual desire, as potential sites for a critique of patriarchy. In conclusion, this paper will shed new light on the evolving representation of female sexuality and the monstrous feminine in contemporary North American horror cinema, whilst exploring the critique of heteronormativity that can be seen in these works.