Associating failure with feminist and queer theories of rebellion seems, at first glance, bafflingly counterintuitive. In seeking social, economic and political equality for all categories of gender, class, and race, shouldn’t we be striving for success? But in the current context of neoliberalism, patriarchal politics and heteronormative societal structures, the definition of this term ‘success’ becomes inextricably dependent upon being straight, white, male, and middle-class. Rather than seeking assimilation of all that which is other into this normative category, perhaps there is resistant potential in exteriority, in weakness, and in failure. In remaining outside normative definitions of success, there is a paradoxical power in the position of the weak, it is a position from which there is possibility to undermine orthodoxies of patriarchy and heteronormativity. 

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At the forefront of queer theory and the embrace of failure is Jack Halberstam, whose The Queer Art of Failure (2011) is dedicated to “all of history’s losers.” Looking at our definitions of time, Halberstam calls out the notion of progress as being a heteronormative and capitalist myth. The normative life narrative within the systems of society today is based on the accumulation of capital, on marriage, and on reproduction, and any deviation from this narrative is perceived as failure. If success is only possible within these structures, failure is automatically assigned, predetermined to many categories of society. Queerness has an unregulated and unpredictable relationship to the life narrative, and must consider what other ways of being are possible. In seeking alternatives to marriage and the nuclear family, systems of friendship, kinship, and community arise as alternative means of connectivity, not sanctioned by a governing body. Subculture thus becomes a way of life for queer people, as non-patriarchal and non-heteronormative communities form. By failing to conform to normative narratives, failure as a counterintuitive critique becomes a quiet form of opposition, manifested in daily acts of questioning definitions, of finding and embracing existing alternatives to the norm. Queerness becomes a position from which to imagine life otherwise. When Halberstam questions what could happen if queer failure were “productively linked to racial awareness, anticolonial struggle, gender variance, and different formulations of the temporality of success,” they imply queerness to be a set of practices rather than a solidified identity inscribed into the body. The expression and acceptance of failure becomes both an art form and a way of life for anyone excluded by hegemonic systems, and this itself is queer.

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In writing first person narratives of non-normative ways of being, Chris Kraus, Maggie Nelson, and Olivia Laing each contribute to this discourse of queer failure. Acknowledging and accepting their positions as perceived second-class citizens of society, each fails to meet expectations; of what it means to be a woman, or a mother, or an author. In both their life narratives and their forms of writing, Kraus, Nelson, and Laing embrace these failures as inherent to their existences. Halberstam describes queer failure as a “narrative without progress,” in which we see “the refusal of legibility, and an art of unbecoming.” This sense of unbecoming, of not knowing, and of getting things wrong weaves through each text as a defining principle, refusing normative progression and coming to terms with imperfection.

 

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Olivia Laing’s eloquent passages on loneliness are, essentially, reflections upon failure. Failing to connect to others - via language, sex, or technology - loneliness becomes a sign of social inadequacy that does not align with normative narratives of success. Writing personally, Laing connects her own loneliness to the gendered expectations of time within a normative narrative of progression, expressing frustrations that female loneliness, by a certain age, “is no longer socially sanctioned and carries with it a persistent whiff of strangeness, deviance and failure.” Within this self-perpetuating cycle of gendered expectations, Laing time and again fails to meet the standards outlined by a heteronormative society. Gender itself plays a key role in her isolation, as Laing describes her childhood self, in an all girls’ school, as having “a sense of gender hopelessly out of kilter with the options then on offer. If I was anything, I was a gay boy; in the wrong place, in the wrong body, in the wrong life.” This sense of wrongness is undeniably not a personal failure, it is instead being explicitly aligned with the ways in which society defines bodies as being either right or wrong through heteronormative binary systems. The ability to perceive and articulate this wrongness within systems perhaps comes with being outside of these systems. Laing cites the diaries of Virginia Woolf in making this suggestion, as Woolf describes her loneliness as a force that drives her from the habitable world. This force, Laing suggests, allows one to experience “an otherwise unreachable experience of reality,” one which allows her to “consider larger questions of what it is to be alive.” Loneliness, like failure, is thus a potentially resistant position of exteriority, opening the individual up to alternative perceptions of the world. The Lonely City becomes a reflection on how this altered perception of failure and success may then be used within art and writing, as Laing aligns her own experiences with those of artists in New York who have managed to create work both indebted to and in spite of isolation and suffering.

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Outsider artist Henry Darger is one such example, with whom Laing identifies via his marginal position in society. She relates her own brief retreat into loneliness, silence, and shame to Darger’s lifelong erasure from society, questioning “what on earth would it be like to live the whole of your life like this, occupying the blind spot in other people’s existences, their noisy intimacies?” This sense of invisibility may be countered by a reflection on the role of art and writing in visibility,  in having a voice and expressing it to the world. Laing seeks this by writing through the ‘I’, and so too did Darger. Darger wrote an extensive autobiography, The History of My Life, recording his own existence into the world, like Laing, by writing his personal story. He also created his own imaginary world in both visual art and writing - the Realms of the Unreal - a phantasmagorical depiction of wars fought over the slavery of children. In his lifetime, Darger made no attempts to publish his work. Entering the public sphere after his death, Darger has thus has had no control over the work’s critical reception. He is instead posthumously spoken for by critics and art historians, and his voice is drowned out by interpretations, many of which include accusations of sexual sadism and paedophilia, and presume his work to be symptomatic of both autism and schizophrenia. This need for historians to diagnose and to categorize Darger’s work brings us back to the issue of a binary instinct in society, and a sense of wrongness. Describing “the part taken by society itself in policing and perpetuating exclusion, rejecting the unwieldy and strange,” Laing frames the posthumous treatment of Darger’s work within a wider history of the diagnosis and treatment of failure in society.

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Laing’s identification with artist David Wojnarowicz pursues similar connections in terms of understanding ostracisation, the ways in which the systems of society diagnose those who are unwieldy and strange. Describing Wojnarowicz’s work as an examination of survival within an antagonistic society, Laing and Wojnarowicz both frame homogeneity as the primary cause of isolation. In favour of diversity, Wojnarowicz’s work explored alternative means of kinship and community, and creativity as an escape from desperate situations. The argument for diversity as a solution to loneliness aligns with Halberstam’s views, particularly their description of the margins as a potentially resistant position. Rather than seeking assimilation, queerness can use its outsider status as a means for liberation. Failure, as perceived by heteronormative culture, is manifested in the ways in which Wojnarowicz, like many other LGBTQ people in New York in the 1980s, was cast out by society. In the years of the Stonewall riots and the Gay Liberation movement, New York city became a site for queer political resistance. The AIDS crisis and widespread misinformation about the disease led to further isolation of its victims, and queerness was contorted by a lens of disease and shame. Wojnarowicz aimed to turn the tables on this viewpoint, highlighting society itself to be at fault. In a biographical account, he frames society itself within the language of disease and shame, noting that “my queerness was a wedge that was slowly separating me from a sick society.”

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Lonely, diseased, and failing. These are not positive positions, nor are they powerful. In arguing in favour of failure, Halberstam does not advocate this kind of suffering. What failure does allow, however, is the potential to critique the systems which allow such suffering to take place, and in turn allows for the imagination of alternative ways of being in the world. Referencing Melanie Klein’s psychological study of loneliness, Laing suggests it is a state which lacks wholeness, but that this idea of wholeness is also a myth, an unattainable state of being. A curative approach to loneliness, to queerness, and to failure is therefore untenable, and we must seek something else. Failure’s resistant potential lies in acknowledging that there are ways to take that which is broken, sick, and damaged, and to put them together in new ways. Attesting to this viewpoint, Laing refers to Darger’s lifelong commitment to collage, repurposing images and glueing them together to imagine another world, his own Realm of the Unreal. Wojnarowicz similarly reconstructed the world through wheatpaste and collage, re-imagining the ways in which society is pieced together. After Wojnarowicz’s death of AIDS in 1992, friend, artist and fellow activist Zoe Leonard created Strange Fruit (For David) (1992-7). An artwork created in the process of mourning for David, Leonard described the work as “a way to sew myself back up.” Stitching together the peels of fruit, the decaying remains of their fruitful existence in the world, Leonard found a process for coming to terms with loss. The work reflects the process of healing through art, one which sees brokenness not as a failure, but as something to be sewn together, and seen anew.

 

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“I was wrong on all counts - imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears.” Maggie Nelson writes these words in The Argonauts about her previous views on pregnancy and maternity, acknowledging past failures while remaining content in her inability to change them. Finding wisdom in not knowing, she continues, “I’m not trying to fix that wrongness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out.” This non-curative approach to failure runs throughout Nelson’s text, as she deals with questions surrounding gender, sexuality, pregnancy, parenting, academia, and art in ways that embrace flexibility and uncertainty. Nelson’s subjective approach to the body exemplifies a resistance to the ways in which queer bodies are negatively or inadequately defined. The challenge Nelson poses to the binary between hetero- and homo- normativity confronts the presumption that assimilation or revolution are the only two options for queer resistance. Reconstructing perceptions of the world through her writing, Nelson reveals the fragility of our innately assumed boundaries, allowing things to be seen anew.

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Returning to the inadequacy of binary definitions, Nelson, like Laing, undermines the heteronormative and biological assumptions of gender. Reaching a pivotal moment in the text in which Harry, post-mastectomy and six months on T, passes as male, and she as pregnant, Nelson reflects; 

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On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more ‘female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging. 

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Through this tension between what is seen and what is felt, Nelson is challenging societal definitions and their inability to reflect individual subjectivity. The reference to time and progression by the aging process reflects one which is outside the normative life narrative. This is Halberstam’s kind of failure, manifested by its non-conformity to normative definition. Nelson, eloquent in her inability to adequately define the pregnant body, or the body that is neither male nor female, turns to non-human terms - she and Harry become human animals. Evading binary definition and embracing plurality, Harry states in his film By Hook or By Crook, “I’m a special - a two for one.” His last name - Dodge - has been chosen in an attempt to capture the feeling of “and or but.” These bodies are sites of uncertainty; messy, subjective, and complex. Their states are not something to be fixed, or cured, but rather to be seen anew. Society’s definitions are not adequate, there is a need to seek something else. Words are not always good enough.

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The body becomes a process rather than a fixed point, like the Argo and its shifting parts, it escapes binary meaning. The pregnant body, in particular, poses challenges to our categorisation of female roles in society. Nelson addresses the difficulties for the pregnant woman to be viewed as anything other than pregnant, quarantined by her maternal state. Examining the spaces for motherhood in academia, Nelson recalls an experience she had at a seminar in which Rosalind Krauss accused Jane Gallop of contaminating academic space with the body. Gallop had shown images of herself and her son, which Krauss viewed as shamefully nude and shamefully maternal, uninformed by academic thinking. This sense that the pregnant body cannot cross into any sphere beyond the maternal reflects a quarantining that Nelson seeks to undermine, by instead exploring it as a site for multiple meanings.

 

Catherine Opie’s Self Portrait/Pervert (1994), is an image of sexual fetish, the artist’s face is obscured by a leather mask and the word ‘pervert’ is carved across her chest in a display of sadomasochistic tendencies. Her Self Portrait/Nursing (2004), taken ten years later, shows the artist breast feeding her child, with ghost of the word ‘pervert’ still visible above her breasts. These images demonstrate the possibility for the maternal body to remain sexual, that the two spheres are not mutually exclusive. This is not the image of heteronormatively successful mother, it is rebellious in its failures to conform to rigid compartmentalisation.

 

Further challenging heteronormative compartmentalisation of a mother’s role, Nelson looks to non-homophobic modes of psychological discourse, particularly to D. W. Winnicott and the concept of “good enough” mothering. For Winnicott, “good enough” mothering is non-gender specific, allowing non-biological and non-gendered parents equal access to adequate care for their children. Writing on a baby’s experience of failure, if its holding environment is not good enough, Winnicott warns of “falling forever, going to pieces.” Reflecting a disunity of psyche and body, and loss of hope for future contact, these words are repeated, woven throughout the text, mirroring Nelson’s own questions of what is good enough, and what is not.

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Nelson’s failures, on the surface, do not seem to equate to the failures outlined by Laing. Happily married, and pregnant, Nelson is paradoxically occupying both normative and non-normative spaces of being. What she is undermining is the notion that one may be categorised as success, and the other, as failure. Simply put, what is right for some is not right for others. In an interview with A. L. Steiner, Nelson expresses frustrations with “the instability of the binary - normative on one hand, and transgressive on the other.” This binary is unsustainable, as is “the demand that anyone live a life that’s all one thing.” Through The Argonauts, Nelson challenges the binary opposition of heteronormativity and homonormativity, as developments in recent politics raise debates with regards to assimilation, particularly in terms of “same-sex” marriage and queer family-making. This opposition places the queer married couple in an impossible position, as queer marriage is seen to undermine heteronormative systems of society, while also reinforcing these systems in a way that undermines queer rebellion. “Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).” 

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Referencing Lee Edelman’s radical queer polemic No Future (2004), both Halberstam and Nelson discuss the notion of reproductive futurism, in which the future is offered through the image of the Child, and thus provides a heteronormative life narrative that Edelman is determined to resist. Aiming to detach queerness from the making of meaning, Edelman suggests an embrace of negativity, a lack of futurity and a position that is “not fighting for the children.” For Nelson, this idea that a rejection of “certain behaviors or bodily enmeshments—with each other, with the state—will deliver one into a radical state of resistance, queer or otherwise, is untenable. It’s decidedly not good enough.” Positing that queer rebellion does not rely on a refusal to marry, or to procreate, she returns once again to the question of what is good enough, but never purports to provide a solution. There is no singular solution, resistance to normative narratives can appear in a multiplicity of forms, and queerness can embrace the symbiotic existence of normativity and transgression. 

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Through a circular narrative form, with dialectical writing and shifting meanings, The Argonauts reads as a book woven together. Like Leonard’s Strange Fruit, it attempts to put together contradictory things, without making sense of them. Intertwining binary oppositions throughout the text, Nelson undermines the boundaries between male and female, sexuality and maternity, cruelty and pleasure. These binaries culminate in the placement of the birth of her child alongside the death of Harry’s mother, simultaneously narrating the emotional pains of loss and the physical pains of new life. Writing the birth as graphic, honest, and rare, Nelson is testing if words are good enough, if they can adequately express the lived experience of physical and emotional suffering.  This testing runs throughout book, as tensions between opposites collapse and make way for new perceptions. Making space for doubt, error, and self-scrutiny, Nelson’s rebellion is in her writing, manifested by acts of questioning. In her writing, in conversation, and in marriage, binaries are broken. For Deleuze and Parnet, and for Nelson, nuptials oppose coupling, in a marriage “there are no longer binary machines.” The same can be said for dialectical writing, and it is writing that fails; to answer questions or to occupy a fixed position. Reflecting on a debate with Harry over a film that polarised assimilation and revolution, Nelson reveals her game. Quoting Deleuze and Parnet, she states, “the aim is not to answer questions, it’s to get out, to get out of it.”

 

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Where both Maggie Nelson and Olivia Laing contribute to a discourse of queer failure by examining the paradoxical contradictions between hetero- and homo- normativity, Chris Kraus writes about female failure in particular, and the “unspoken rules that regulate success and failure in the art world.” Failing sexually, Kraus is not considered to be a conventionally attractive object of desire. Her own desire manifests in unconventional ways, ones typically cast out of dominant narratives as grotesque, unwieldy and strange. Failing professionally, her films are widely unsuccessful and she must rely on her husband for financial support. Her dependence on a wealthy and more successful older husband rendered her invisible in the art world, viewed primarily as Sylvère’s ‘plus one.’ By her obsession with Dick, Kraus finds a way to speak, to make herself heard and to become visible. Initially an exercise in potential escape from her failures, the text becomes increasingly an embrace of losing, calling out the ways in which women are predetermined to fail should they venture beyond patriarchal views of normativity. An articulate art of failure, I Love Dick moves from obsessive letters towards an essayistic format, as Kraus finds an outlet for her critical voice in which she can discuss the work of female artists and activists, those who have also been marginalised in some way by patriarchal standards of success.

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The binary Kraus seeks to address and to escape is the false opposition created between female intelligence and female sexuality. In a patriarchal narrative, a woman can’t be both. In this way, the female gender is denied access to the category of genius. “An intellectual woman couldn’t possibly be sexualised in any way,” Kraus argues in a recent interview with SLEEK magazine, “so for women to refuse to pretend to be perfect, is this accused of being a failure? Does failure substitute the word human?” Herein lies the gendered bias of failure; male genius accepts human imperfections, female genius does not. Throughout I Love Dick, Kraus and her friend Liza Martin epitomise the split between seriousness and sexuality, enacting a performative representation of stereotypical female images. Kraus describes their proposal for a schizophrenic sexual performance, inviting a musician to sleep with them as if they were one person. They would enact the cyborgian split projected on all women by patriarchal culture, as Liza would perform the physical act, and Chris would perform the verbal. He declined. But beyond this performance, Kraus repeatedly refers throughout the text to ways in which Liza Martin succeeded over her in attracting male sexual attention, while she was limited to the role of the Serious Young Woman. Failing to be conventionally appealing, the Serious Young Woman is subjected to sexual debasement, as male domination attempts to ‘feminise’ her. Expressing her informed opinions in sexual spaces is unacceptable, or at least undesirable. Kraus discusses her experiences of dancing in topless bars, and in Dick’s living room over a glass of wine, in which her opinions provoke the accusation - “You think too much.” In a patriarchal culture, there is no room for intelligence in sexual spheres, and no room for sexuality in intellectual spheres.

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Kraus’s acceptance of failure, her productive use of it, comes with her use of the ‘I’. Writing a personal narrative, Kraus articulates a universal female experience, unraveling the ways in which patriarchal culture frames and regards not only her, but all women. Striving to move beyond the personal, emotional, narcissistic narrative, Kraus’s ‘I’ articulates issues that are not only psychological, but social. Representative of multiplicity, Kraus embraces insincerity and complexity, describing herself as “several. And-and-and.” Through the articulation of her experiences as a woman, and the experiences of all women, Kraus is finding a way out of the binary. Her aim is not to provide solutions, it’s to get out, to get out of it. This escape, for Kraus, is manifested within the work of artist Hannah Wilke, whose SOS Starification Object Series (1974-1979) exemplifies the paradox of serious art and the embodied intellectual female self. Its critical reception framed Wilke either as an avatar of sexual liberation or a narcissist for sexual self-display. She was polarised by critics, neither interpretation allowing for both sexuality and genius. The way in which Kraus examines the work of R. B. Kitaj offers an insight into an escape from this binary opposition, particularly her response to his work If Not, Not (1975-6). Through a painting that reflects the difficulties of addressing the Holocaust in art, Kitaj, and subsequently Kraus, addresses the role of history and memory in shaping contemporary art practice. Looking to a Jewish attitude, in which she sees no hope for transcendence or redemption, Kraus writes - “the dead come back to dance not as spirits but as skeletons.” That the weight of history is ever present, undeniable and inescapable, is a fact that must be accepted. Assuming the character of Gabi Teisch from The Patriot, Kraus reflects, “until we own our history, she thought, I thought, there can be no change.” Kitaj, Wilke, and Kraus use past trauma, negative criticisms, and failures as subjects for their art, and as potential conduits to change. History, like failure, is unavoidable, but it can be used as fuel for art practices - this is the queer art of failure. 

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Eileen Myles, writing the introduction to the first U. S. edition of I Love Dick, describes the work as “a remarkable study in female abjection,” in which Kraus is “marching boldly into self-abasement.” This self-abasement, like Hannah Wilke’s, is the art, the potential way out of patriarchal world-views. Myles continues, “in Chris’ case, abjection… is the road out from failure. Into something bright and exalted, like presence.” I Love Dick turns the tables against our definitions of failure and success, using the failures projected onto all women by a patriarchal culture as material for art. “If art’s a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become a subject too. Dear Dick, That’s what I realised when I fell in love with you.” By the end of text, after Dick’s crushing xerox-copy response to her work, Kraus goes to show her film. No longer a narrative about failure in career or in love, something else has been articulated, made possible by articulation itself. Kraus pieces together the failings of her life in order to make something new, allowing altered perspectives on femaleness and on failure to come into being.

 

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A queer art of failure is a form of escape. It is an escape from binary opposition, from classification, and from normativity. Used in literary and artistic forms, failure can provide a necessary outlet for opposition to heteronormative, patriarchal, and capitalist hegemonies. Olivia Laing articulates failure through her identification with those marginalised by loneliness, illness, and gender norms. Maggie Nelson’s failure thrives in her contradictory prose and messy subjectivity, allowing her to occupy multiple spaces both in- and out- side of normative values. Chris Kraus characterises failure as both political and patriarchal - an inescapable part of the history of female experience, and the history of her own life. Each author makes use of the ‘I’ in order to contextualise personal failures within social and political histories, narrating failures that represent a long history of marginalisation and repression. Art provides a space for the reclassification of failure, a means by which we can break down preconceived notions of normativity and build up alternative ways of being in the world. It is a space for breaking things apart, for weaving them together, and for binding them, imperfectly.