LOSING HOPE, FINDING NEMO AND DREAMING OF ALTERNATIVES

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For Halberstam, the alternative resides in a creative engagement with subjugated histories, an ecstatic investment in the subcultural and a defiant refusal of a dominant model of theory—one that Halberstam considers to be at odds with cultural studies—which devotes itself to the production of ever more detailed maps of the hegemonic and to a particular mode of disciplinary authority. In keeping with her earlier work on the gaps and fissures in dominant masculinity expressed as female masculinity or the disruptions of normative uses of time and space expressed by subcultural actors, and in recognition of the work represented here in this volume, Halberstam argues for more serious engagement with subjugated knowledges, tries to enact a current of public intellectualism that she calls ‘low theory,’ and argues for the necessity of producing both alternative knowledge formations and their archives.