Between Papers and Films: Imagining New Worlds with Donna Haraway and Jack Halberstam

Abstract

This research aimed to analyze the place of fiction in the production of knowledge in queer feminist theory. To this end, I analyze Donna Haraway's uses of science fiction in her work Cyborg Manifesto (1985/2009), and then delve into Jack Halberstam's proposal regarding the potentials present in children's animations in his work The Queer Art of Failure (2011/2020). Both authors demonstrate how fictions are potential sources of knowledge for imagining new worlds and different possibilities for producing existence. Based on an understanding of the strategies used by these two authors to challenge the heterosexual matrix, I subscribe to the queer task of seeking a way out of the colonizing reality that oppresses the dissident population of the cis-heterosexual system. I propose that both authors find fertile ground in these alternative media that can condense abstract theories into more accessible languages, or as Halberstam suggests, they operate with a “low theory”, providing tools for a production of knowledge that escapes the traditional textual formatting, with restrictive norms and elaborate words, the so-called “high theory”.