(Source: twitter.com)

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“… failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods” (Halberstam 2011:3)

“… positive thinking is a a North American affliction, ‘a mass delusion’ that emerges out of a combination of American exceptionalism and a desire to believe that success happens to good people and failure is just a consequence of a bad attitude rather than structural conditions… Positive thinking is offered up as a cure for cancer, a path to untold riches, a surefire way to engineer your own success. Indeed believing that success depends upon one’s attitude is far preferable to recognizing that their success is the outcome of the titled scales of race, class, and gender… 

For the nonbelievers outside the cult of positive thinking, however, the failures and losers, the grouchy, irritable whiners who do not want to ‘have a nice day’ and who do not believe that getting cancer has made them better people, politics offers a better explanatory framework than personal disposition. For these negative thinkers, there are definite advantages to failing. Relieved of the obligation to keep smiling through chemotherapy or bankruptcy, the negative thinker can use the experience of failure to confront the gross inequalities of everyday life in the United States” (Ibid, 3-4)

- From J. Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011) 

(Source: micro-resistance)

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