Rogueish
03/18/12
Oddly, though, the actual theory that people think is queer theory remains, often, homo-supremacist and gender-mobility-supremacist. The symptom of this return to feminist terms, which I will note whenever it appears, is its failure, so far anyways, to produce interesting nondismissive and normatively unfraught work on the queerness of masculine male heterosexual desire for the sexy femininity of women.
― Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism
12/24/11
Not everything in this book falls under the headings of frivolity, silliness, or jocularity, but the “silly archive,” to adapt Lauren Berlant’s priceless phrase about “the counter-politics of the silly object,” allows me to make claims for alternatives that are markedly different from the claims that are made in relation to high-cultural archives. The texts that I prefer here do not make us better people or liberate us from the culture industry, but they might offer strange and anticapitalist logics of being and acting and knowing, and they will harbor covert and overt queer worlds. I do believe that if you watch Dude, Where’s My Car? slowly and repeatedly and while perfectly sober, the mysteries of the universe may be revealed to you.
― Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
Janelle Monáe walks the Tightrope between conceptual art weirdness and robo-pop stardom | Music | The Guardian→
07/10/10
Slightly odd that Hattie Collins chooses Lady Gaga and Rihanna to contrast Monáe with. Rihanna is probably the most interesting person in mainstream R&B right now, and Gaga is, like Monáe, straddling the line between popularity and artistic extravagance, and also like Monáe (and like Nicki Minaj, too), a lot queerer than most female pop stars.
