On Wildness and Failure: Reading Jack Halberstam in India

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to think through certain crises in gender and sexuality with the philosophical ideas of ‘wildness’ and ‘failure,’ as articulated in Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020) and The Queer Art of Failure (2011). The essay analyses how preoccupations with meritocracy, capitalism, legibility and success shape our understanding of gender binarism, heterosexism and other normative modes of being. In India especially, the aftermath of the Transgender Amendment Act (2026), which seeks to delegitimise the question of self-determination of gender to establish trans-ness and gender as categories to be verified by screening committees and medical boards, has opened up crucial junctures to think through anxieties about gender and sexuality in popular and political discourses. These anxieties often result in attitudes reflected in visual media whenever it seeks to represent the queer subject. Moreover, since India still operates as a caste-hierarchical society, questions about intersectionality also feature in the politics and aesthetics of representation, and, inadvertently, many stories about queer lives mirror queer concerns about success and failure. Halberstam’s ideas offer possibilities to think beyond ‘orderliness’ and taxonomic obsessions and re-imagine failure as resistance. This paper refers to four South Asian films, Karan Kandhari’s Sister Midnight (2024), Abhishek Kapoor’s Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Neeraj Ghaywan’s Geeli Pucchi (2021) and Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2020) to understand the radical possibilities wildness and failure can offer for queer subjectivities in India.