The Queer Art of Failure is a difficult book to review because Halberstam, in the introduction, announces his intention to provoke and annoy – does my frustration, then, not indicate a success on the author’s part? Even the title could be interpreted as a clever set-up, recasting the book’s failure to deliver on its promises as a demonstration of that titular “Queer Art.”

The idea of analysing animated movies through a queer and/or anticapitalist lens is not a new one, at least not to me. I’ve watched my fair share of video essays. Perhaps this approach was innovative in 2011, when the book was published, but any novelty it may once have had has since been lost. Maybe that novelty carried it a decade ago. Now it’s just another entry into the genre, and a relatively weak one at that.

It has an intriguing premise, but the execution is lacking. When Halberstam does make a good point it’s rarely relevant to the overall theme. Most of his arguments are either about queerness but not failure, or about failure but not queerness. Calling misfits “stupid,” for example, has a lot more to do with ableism than homophobia. And the masculinist interplay between homosexuality and fascism has little if anything to do with failure. The most convincing demonstration of queer failure the book has to offer is a section on butches, presenting them as women who “fail” to perform womanhood and lesbians who “fail” to appeal to the male gaze, and arguing that masculinity itself is a near-mythic ideal that everyone, including cis men, “fails” to fully realise. Besides these occasional insights, there’s more shlock here than substance.

I’m disappointed. I’d hoped for more. Maybe it’s just not for me. At one point I genuinely wondered whether this whole book was simply a joke at the reader’s expense. I don’t understand why it’s heralded as a classic of queer theory, but hey, if you got something out of it that’s great.

CONTENT WARNINGS: self harm, suicide, slavery, the Holocaust, fascist ideology, use of slurs such as tr*nny and f*ggot, also a preoccupation with pedophilia and incest which manifests as incessant sexual readings of children’s interests and relationships