ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the notion of queer failure, which has been put forward in various strands of queer theory. Before examining the ways in which the notion was mobilized theoretically and politically – notably in the work of Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, José Esteban Muñoz, and Jack Halberstam – the chapter retraces the history of the “discipline” which has come to be known as “queer theory,” and identifies a number of theoretical and practical difficulties in thinking about the borders of that field of inquiry. These difficulties have to do with queer theory’s relation to its own language, and more particularly with a certain untranslatability of “queer.” In other words, before discussing specific works by queer theorists who have made “failure” their object of study (usually in the form of “queer failure”), the chapter identifies a broader but also more intimate connection between queer theory and failure. In the course of the study, the chapter mobilizes the deconstructive notion of “fallibility” in order to interrogate the success/failure dichotomy and, hopefully, to refresh and invigorate the type of questioning performed by queer theory with respect to both success and failure.
