Final notes on “The Queer Art of Failure”
Halberstam’s chapter “Homosexuality and Fascism” takes a new turn in the book’s unpicking of the constructed categories of failure. In previous chapters the queer position is found outside of the paradigms of success wrote by the dull heteronormatives. This chapter opens a wider pool of participants of the writings of our grand narratives: gays too, are complicit in constructing histories that may reduce the dynamic multiplicity of relations between politics and sexuality. This sweet reduction gives the queer an uninterrupted position of positive victimhood. Discussing the relations between queers and fascist movements, particulary the nazi party in Germany, Halberstam shows how activists from around the world have overlooked evidence of gay participation in fascist regimes, while increasing the number of gay men killed in concentration camps. Gay activist Harvey Milk famously stated that 300,000 queers were killed in gas chambers. In reality they were imprisoned and tortured in these camps, but not murdered.
Why could this be bad? Filmmaker Stuart marshall reveals the dangers of reductionist identity politics, and in doing so suggests how helpful it can be in our movements towards liberation. “Lost in the analogy are all those aspects of difference and subjectivity that identity politics subordinates and suppresses precisely to enure polticial solidarity and action. This has, on a subtle level, far reaching and political consequences.”
So in forming a politics of identity that amplifies the victimhood of queer people, we carve a space out for ourselves. We deserve space! Who’s left behind? Halberstam’s discussion of homosexuality and fascism inevitably points towards the tensions between popular queer political movements in the West and struggles of racialisation, colonialism and xenophobia. Promoting the “good gays” by removing complex historical links between gays and fascism makes it hard to discuss the fact that some white gays are rascist, for example. Or in a structural sense, how the “sucessful liberation” of the white gay male in certain countries means a welcoming of that identity into forms of nationalism and the nuclear family that lean in to ideas of racial supremacy. Halberstam’s promotion of failure, then, sees the pitfalls in a politics of liberation that depend and cling on to certain narratives of success.
How can we reclaim these aspects of difference and subjectivity that Marshall calls for, while participating in collective dialogue and movement that aims to tackle social inequality?