Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction explores the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production, theorizing a perish-performative that allows for agency in practices of abeyance. It rejects the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, outlining a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and imaginative reverie.

Format: Hardback
Length: 208 pages
Publication date: 02 March 2023
Publisher: Oxford University Press

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction challenges prevailing models of queer performativity by emphasizing the experiential richness and political potential of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study proposes a perish-performative framework that enables agency in practices of abeyance, and it uncovers within the queer archive a profound environmental ethos that opposes inflationary notions of human existence. By linking modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then transitioning to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book challenges the notion that queerness becomes increasingly loud and proud over time. Instead, it delineates a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity where queerness finds escape, respite, and diverse opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacles, rewards and restores the queer self, while also contesting the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that harm the planet and perpetuate social disparities based on race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction offers a range of accounts detailing the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils associated with pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

Weight: 388g
Dimension: 224 x 145 x 18 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780192896339