The Queer Art of Failure (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

Roughgarden’s wonderful study of evolutionary diversity, Evolution’s Rainbow (2004), explains that most biologists observe “nature” through a narrow and biased lens of socionormativity and therefore misinterpret all kinds of biodiversity. And so, although transsexual fish, hermaphroditic hyenas, nonmonoga-

Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.

inheres

recalcitrant

In Over the Hedge, Robots, Finding Nemo, and other Pixarvolts desire for difference is not connected to a neoliberal “Be yourself” mentality or to special individualism for “incredible” people; rather the Pixarvolt films connect individualism to selfishness, to untrammeled consumption, and they oppose it with a collective mentality.

ineptitude

For Scott, to “see like a state” means to accept the order of things and to internalize them; it means that we begin to deploy and think with the logic of the superiority of orderliness and that we erase and indeed sacrifice other, more local practices of knowledge, practices moreover that may be less efficient, may yield less marketable results, b

learning is a two-way street and you cannot teach without a dialogic relation to the learner.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999), James C. Scott details the ways the modern state has run roughshod over local, customary, and undisciplined forms of knowledge in order to rationalize and simplify social, agricultural, and political practices that have profit as their primary motivation. In