Book News: The possibilities and perils of disappearing acts in queer fiction

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction

BY BENJAMIN BATEMAN

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192896339

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/queer-disappearance-in-modern-and-contemporary-fiction-9780192896339

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction breaks with appearance-based models of queer performativity and argues for the experiential richness and political potentials of recessive tendencies in twentieth and twenty-first-century queer literary production. The study theorizes a "perish-performative" that allows for agency in practices of abeyance, and it discovers within queerness's ample archive of vanishing acts an environmental ethos antithetical to inflationary versions of the human. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classic Dancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream and the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold's Lote, the book refuses the common wisdom that queerness becomes louder and prouder over time, delineating instead a minimalist and daydreaming subjectivity wherein queerness finds escape, respite, and varied opportunities for imaginative reverie. This precarious subjectivity, necessitated but not defined by oppression and obstacle, rewards and restores the queer self, and it also contests the logics of development, acquisition, and productivity that wreak havoc on the planet and entrench social disparities of race, class, and ability. Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction supplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.

• Places modernist classics in conversation with contemporary queer and environmental fiction
• Intertwines literary studies, queer theory, and the environmental humanities
• Advances critical alternatives to 'coming out' narratives
• Revises theories of gender and sexual performativity

Benjamin Bateman is senior lecturer in Post-1900 British Literature at The University of Edinburgh and author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (Oxford UP, 2017). He previously held a joint appointment in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at California State University Los Angeles, where he also served as director of The Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities.