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In the queer art of failure, Judith Halberstam considers the critical potential of aesthetic and cultural moments of failure. She writes, "Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbe- coming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well" (1). It is indeed easy to think of the many ways queers can be said to fail: we fail to live up to a certain heteronormative relational ideal, often eschewing marriage, monogamy, and traditional family forms; we frequently fail to perform gender accord- ing to socially prescribed scripts; we even fail to grow up, instead "growing sideways," as Kathryn Bond Stockton describes it, into lateral relations and erotic attachments that defy linear models of development (11). There are moments in Halberstam's book, however, where her articulation of failure's constitution becomes muddied. She writes, for example, that "The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery" (120-21). Do these strategies for practising failure-falling short and getting distracted, for example-necessarily constitute failure, which seems to suggest a kind of finality,...