Resisting Societal Norms

As part of Put Up Your Dukes! Gabrielle and I made a series of three books extrapolating upon and extending the thinking behind the project. Resisting Societal Norms provides background to the work in this project but also maps much of the territory that I am deeply interested in researching further. As such it provides a research handbook; ideas posited and awaiting development (and contestation, complication and repudiation).

I will post this book in sections over the next days/weeks in the lead up to the second part of Put Up Your Dukes!, a book launch and  exhibition of plan B’s and also ran ideas generated by, but not used in, from the Blue Oyster show. It will be held at Pearce Gallery, 130 St Georges Bay Rd, Parnell, Auckland New Zealand, on Monday 7 October.

In the first pages of Born Losers Scott Sandage reminds us that our modern preoccupation with weighing up our lives, deeds and endeavours on the scales of success and failure is exactly that- a modern construct revealing the darker side of the American Dream.

I am currently reading (and hugely excited by) The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam[1], in the introduction to this text Halberstam touches on the same territory

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[1] Halberstam, Judith The Queer Art of Failure, 2011, Duke University Press