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

execrable

dastardly

certitude

bumbling

of course the very idea of the exotic, as we know from all kinds of postcolonial theories of tourism and orientalism, depends upon an increasingly outdated notion of the domestic, the familiar, and the known, all of which come into being by positing a relation to the foreign, the alien, and the indecipherable.

The swarm presents as a mass rather than a unitary enemy and offers no obvious target; thinking as a single superorganism, the swarm is elusive, ephemeral, in flight. Like

teacher who realized that people must be led to learn rather than taught to follow. Ranciére comments ironically, “Like all conscientious professors,

male vulnerability, or making a spectacle of male stupidity, or anatomizing

What kinds of reward can failure offer us? Perhaps most obviously, 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.