eBook - ePub

Failing Desire

Name: Failing Desire
ISBN: 9781438468921

Karmen MacKendrick,

220 pages
English
ePUB (mobile friendly)
Available on iOS & Android

eBook - ePub

Failing Desire

Karmen MacKendrick,

About this book

Luckily for human diversity, we are perfectly capable of desiring impossible things. Failing Desire explores a particular set of these impossibilities, those connected to humiliation. These include the failure of autonomy in submission, of inward privacy in confession, of visual modesty in exhibition, and of dignity in playing various roles. Historically, those who find pleasure in these failures range from ancient Cynics through early Christian monks to those now drawn by queer or perverse eroticism. As Judith Halberstam pointed out in The Queer Art of Failure, failure can actually be a mode of resistance to demands for what a culture defines as success. Karmen MacKendrick draws on this interest in queer refusals. To value, desire, or seek humiliation undercuts any striving for success, but it draws our attention particularly to the failures of knowledge as a form of power, whether that knowledge is of one body or of a population. How can we understand will that seeks not to govern itself, psychology that constructs inwardness by telling all, blushing shame that delights in exposure, or dignity that refuses its lofty position? Failing Desire suggests that the power of these desires and pleasures comes out of the very realization that this question can never quite be answered.

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Yes, you can access Failing Desire by Karmen MacKendrick in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Theology & Religion & Philosophy History & Theory. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.