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Fifty years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder, his words on the need to educate people about the value of defeat resonate more vividly than ever. In a world where success, efficiency and productivity set the pace for what is considered a dignified life, the queer art of failure, as proposed by Jack Halberstam [1],[1] Halberstam, Jack (2011). El arte queer del fracaso [The art of queer failure]. Madrid: Editorial Egales. becomes a form of resistance, a desire for other forms of worldbuilding. It is not about giving up, but about questioning and disobeying the mandates of triumph and the overlords that nurture them. It is about living slowly, about cultivating listening, attention, boredom, about inhabiting the margins, whatever they may be, about sustaining desire in the crevices of what is possible. Today, once again in the recent history of humanity, we need to enable another want more than ever.
I think that failure, insofar as it is queer, is but a political and creative force: a manner of building community from fragility and imagination from precariousness, of establishing alliances and expanding democracy in all its senses and pushing it towards a different space, one where (post) fascism and warlords have no shelter. In the face of the arrogance of the neoliberal, post-neoliberal, technoliberal victors, vindicating the strength of those who lose, stumble or are left on the roadside, in the ditches or under the rubble of bombed-out lands, this is the storm that lights up the lighthouse. To fail is also to reject a world that leaves no room for that which is human and its posthuman amalgamations. This is the power of queerness.
Queer—and, later, in Spanish, cuir—emerged precisely from the margins of success. Although it has penetrated academic discourse, it was born not in universities, but in the streets, in bodies and lives that do not fit in. It was in the destitute bodies marked by AIDS that this seed sprouted. The philosopher and activist Paco Vidarte expressed it so lucidly [2]:[2] Vidarte, Paco (2007). Ética marica [Faggot ethics]. Barcelona: Editorial Egales. queer will never enter academia peacefully; it is a residue that the system cannot digest. It is the indecent, the unteachable, that which escapes. Its power lies in this break from the norm, in resistance, in its multiple alliances and imaginations. I myself stem from this drift: from a genealogy of bodies and thoughts that learned to survive by improvising strategies in the face of rejection, exclusion and illness.
Photo_ Benjamín de la Calle_ Portrait of The excluded (Álvaro Echavarría), 1910. Public Pilot Library of Medellín / Photographic Archive_ Public Domain
Over time, the term cuir began to replace queer in many Spanish-speaking contexts. It was not a mere translation, but a twist of language. To say cuir was to claim a place of one’s own, a geopolitical and cultural distinctiveness. As the philosopher Sayak Valencia puts it [3],[3] Valencia, Sayak (2015). Capitalismo gore [Gore capitalism]. Madrid: Editorial Melusina. cuir seeks “other methodologies of enunciation,” disobedient and decolonial. In the face of the hegemony of the English language and the Global North, cuir emerges from mixed-race territories, from the colourful bodies inhabiting both celebration and violence. It is a way of saying: we exist from another place, we think from other wounds.
In Spain, the adoption of cuir was also a political statement. It meant locating our struggles within our own framework, between feminist memory, post-Franco activism and local resistance. When pronouncing cuir, the words bend, open up, slide, and in that linguistic contortion, a whole history of bodies, accents and desires that do not fit into the neutrality of English seeps in. It is not just a question of phonetics: it is a means of decolonising thought and affirming that theories and concepts do not travel disembodied, that every idea has its own geography, skin, and rhythm.
From this perspective, cuir is not a fixed identity, but a complex, radical social relationship. It does not describe who I am, but how I relate. It is a way of being in the world with others, of articulating unstable, affective, precarious alliances and fighting for beauty and joy among and alongside others. It is not about claiming one’s own space, but about devising a common one. That is why cuir is, above all, a politics of the relational. As Karen Barad writes [4],[4] Barad, Karen (2023). Cuestión de materia. Trans/Materia/Realidades y performatividad queer de la naturaleza [A matter of matter. Trans/matter/realities and queer performativity in nature]. Madrid: Holobionte Ediciones. the important thing is not to universalise cuir experience, but to materialise it in its specificity. There is no pure ‘outside’ from which to act: change happens within, in the very matter of who we are. And we are different. That is why cuir-ness is committed to a radical equality of difference. It is impossible to conceive gender without its intersection with race, class or nationality. Cuir struggles are always plural and collective, born in action and transformed in encounter. This relational vision is nourished by the thinking of De Lauretis, who warns of the risk of turning equality into indifference while calling for radical openness to difference [5][5] De Lauretis, Teresa (1994). Diferencias [Differences]. Madrid: Horas y Horas (re-edited in 2024).[6].[6] De Lauretis, Teresa (2025). Figuras de resistencia [Figures of resistence]. Madrid: Kaótica Libros.
The political power of cuir lies precisely in its instability. Unable to settle on a fixed identity, it forces us to constantly reinvent ourselves. This plasticity makes it resistant to market or state co-optation. In contrast to representation policies—which seek faces, slogans, and quotas—cuir is committed to collective practices, affective networks, and cross-cutting alliances that transcend class, race, gender, age, and physicality. Its method is contagion, not purity. Its tactic is improvisation. Its ethic is care. Its territory is well-being, which is constructed collectively.
Feminism is its closest genealogy and its most demanding partner in conversation. From it, we inherit the critical tools to think about bodies and politics, but also the tensions between equality and difference. Queerness challenges feminism; it prompts it to reexamine itself and question its own limits. Not because it denies feminist history, but because it continues it through other means. Just as feminism fought for equality, cuir clings to difference as an emancipatory horizon. There is no contradiction between the two: there is dialogue, friction, and expansion.
In the 1990s, while institutional feminism sought legal recognition, cuir and transfeminist movements opened up space to imagine other ways of life, beyond the heterosexual household or the ‘woman’ subject as a central figure. We proposed other forms of kinship, motherhood, affection, exchange, and science. We questioned the naturalness of sex, desire, and even the species. On the margins of the system, we invented an ethics of risk, an aesthetics of care, a politics of bonds and the body.
Failure, in that context, proved to be a powerful tool. To fail was to not meet the expectations of gender, the market, academia, and the state. It was to not fit in, and in that non-fitting in, having the space to breathe. Cuir lives, precarised and multiple, showed that there is no single way to live right. That cultural homogenisation and the success that defines it are not, in fact, a universal value, but a trap—a fateful and tragic one. In failure, we find a way to inhabit time, to resist the speed and competitiveness that demand we be productive even in pain.
To fail is not to give up: it is to tear open a crack in the machinery of success so that life can break in.
Today, we are experiencing a crisis of gender, but also a crisis of meaning. Certainties are faltering, reactionary discourses are proliferating, and yet something is opening up. The younger generations no longer place as much faith in norms, but they also struggle to find a clear refuge. They are driven by a mixture of freedom and exhaustion, desire and anxiety. As a professor, I see it every day: the young look for a place where they can think without fear, where they can put their uncertainty into words. And I believe that there, within that tremor, lies the political opportunity of the present.
Cuir-ness does not offer closed solutions, but rather questions. It teaches us to inhabit contradiction, to sustain discomfort. To remember that critical thinking is not about having answers, but about continuing to ask questions. As José Esteban Muñoz [7][7] Esteban Muñoz, José (2009). Utopía queer. El entonces y allí de la futuridad antinormativa [Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity]. Caja Negra (re-edited in 2020). says, utopia is not a place, but a gesture. This gesture—that of imagining another way of being together—is, for me, the essence of cuir.
Sometimes people ask me if I’m not afraid that all this will turn into a fad, a commodity, an empty slogan. Of course, I’m afraid. However, I also know that cuir politics resist being completely domesticated. Its strength lies not in words, but in the bodies that utter them. As long as there are bodies that deviate, that dance, that love differently, cuir thought will live on.
To think from failure is to practise radical hope. We seek not redemption, but possibility. In the ruins of the post-neoliberal world, cuir creates community, desire and language. To fail is not to give up: it is to tear open a crack in the machinery of success so that life can break in. Cuir future promises not happiness, but shared existence. And that in itself is plenty.
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