Shadow feminism and a queer art of failure
I’ve recently stumbled upon Alexandra Pugh’s article “Unbecoming Woman: The Shadow Feminism of King Kong théorie by Virginie Despentes”, a book that had a significant impact on me. Pugh talks about Despentes’ radical feminism in connection to Jack Halberstam’s ideas of “shadow feminism”, something that he explores in his book “The queer art of failure”. So, I downloaded available version and flew through it. And this is what a brief explanation of the concept looks like:
“I am proposing that feminists refuse the choices as offered—freedom in liberal terms or death—in order to think about a shadow archive of resistance, one that does not speak in the language of action and momentum but instead articulates itself in terms of evacuation, refusal, passivity, unbecoming, unbeing. This could be called an antisocial feminism, a form of feminism preoccupied with negativity and negation” (Halberstam 2011: 129).
According to Halberstam, shadowy feminism refuses to inherit behavioral patterns, generational traumas along with the notions of colonizer-colonized, leading to a complete eradication of oneself from the colonization discourse. He draws example from “Autobiography of My Mother (1997)” by Jamaica Kinkaid, a fascinating story about a woman who chose “unbecoming”:
“In her refusal of identity as such Xuela models a kind of necropolitical relation to colonialism: her refusal to be is also a refusal to perform the role of other within a system that demands her subjugation” (Halberstam 2011: 132).
And finally, I was completely smitten by Halberstam’s exceptional analysis of Elfriede Jelinek’s “The Piano Teacher”, a novel that contributed to Jelinek receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature back in 2004, while also inflicting a lot of backlash and negativity among both critics and readers. “The Piano Teacher” is truly one of the most brilliantly repulsive novels I’ve came across. Halberstam’s analysis finally helped me to settle my own relationship with the book, and, consequently with the eponymous film directed by Michael Haneke.
When I watched the movie adaptation about ten years ago, I was flabbergasted by the sheer brutality and seeming absurdity of everything that was happening on the screen, and I still think that Erika Kohut is one of the most unhinged woman ever existed in fiction. Halberstam attempts to explain her behavior referring to psychoanalysis, then elevates the discourse to another level by revealing her inner conflict with mainstream ideology:
“…a shadowy sexual impulse that most people would rather deny or sublimate. If taken seriously, unbecoming may have its political equivalent in an anarchic refusal of coherence and proscriptive forms of agency”. (Halberstam 2011: 135).
Thus, Erika’s masochism and self-loathing is a form of revolt against fascist nationalism (a part of her inheritance in post WW2 Austria), bourgeois perceptions of art and misogyny deeply rooted in society, that translates into a subconscious level and leads to her seemingly irrational behavior.
What a twisted relationship with oneself.
Sources:
Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press. 2011
Pugh, Alexandra. Unbecoming Woman: The Shadow Feminism of King Kong théorie by Virginie Despentes:
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/para.2023.0430