ABSTRACT
The reader will become acquainted with J. Jack Halberstam, who refuses to make concessions to neoliberal gender politics, in particular the essentialist modes of living and relating as gendered subjects that are conditioned and codified by them. The academic context in which Halberstam’s work has been written is key for understanding its influence, in particular within cultural studies and the humanities. This chapter discusses three critical concepts developed in Halberstam’s writing that variously illustrate the theme of gender, fluidity and embodiment. These include female masculinities, failure as queer negativity and gaga feminism. She illustrates the diverse embodiments of female masculinities by, for example, exhuming representations of ‘butch’ women in literature and film, and examining the cultural phenomena of ‘drag kings’. Halberstam uses a particular permutation of queer negativity to problematize the reading of failure as a bad attitude on the part of the individual rather than structural conditions, and instead focus on the benefits of failure.
