FAIL AGAIN, FAIL BETTER
On Thursday 19 of April 6pm Six chairs book and guest-host Ellen Tracy will run its fith twice monthly Open Reading Group – Clap when you want to! – which is an invitation to read ahead, collectively discuss and support dear bodies of women, of the earthly and the technological, and seek the joy of learning the planetary together. With this weeks readings, we’ll be asking what the figure of the ‘failure’ can do for practices of resistance. Each of these authors situate an unruly body at the center of their critical practice, sitting in with these outcasts and refusing to make accommodations. Rejecting normative success, each of these pieces asks us what happens when we reclaim these negative positions, gleefully occupying the ugly, the uncool and the failed on the way to radically shifting the values of society.
With Judith/Jack Halberstam’s text we’ll learn from cartoon characters about The Queer Art of Failure, using ‘low theory’ to see failure as a creative alternative to heteronormative success. Sara Ahmed’s Killjoy Manifesto, will call us to not ‘get over it’, to embrace being maladjusted on out way to enacting juster worlds. A fragment from Eli Clare’s collaged work Brilliant Imperfection, will wade into worlds of disability, queerness, and environmentalism, destabilizing the conception that a ‘cure’ is desirable at all.
Inspired by the saying ‘If you can’t read a body, you’ll never finish a book’ from ‘The Great Outdoors’ (graphic novel by Monika Janulevičiūtė and Monika Kalinauskaitė), we believe that learning sensitivity of reading bodies could lead us to reading more or, rather, finding substantially new ways of reading books. This ORG concerns itself both with the critical feminist practices and its legacies, the cosmical and the comical, & material interdependence and suffering from ills of another species, engaging with hybrid thinkers working along the lines of cultural theory, biology, feminist sciences and technology.
READINGS AND MATERIALS: Judith Halberstam The Queer Art of Failure, “Introduction: Low Theory” p. 1-5; Sara Ahmed A Killjoy Manifesto in BAD FEELINGS by Arts Against Cuts; Eli Clare Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, “Chapter 8: Moving Through Cure” p. 129-139.
Materials will be in English. Conversations might swing between Lithuanian/ English depending on participants’ mood and preferences.
TO SIGN-UP AND RECEIVE MATERIALS, please write to info@sixchairsbooks.lt; space is very very limited, but, if necessary we can move around the KAH building.
The session will take place at the bookstore (Kauno Menininkų Namai / V. Putvinskio 56, Kaunas) from 6 to 8 pm. It is free and hot beverages are provided.
CLAP IF YOU WANT TO!