Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction [Hardcover]

Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fictionbreaks 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.Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fictionbreaks 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. Tying modernist classics by E.M. Forster and Willa Cather to Andrew Holleran's gay classicDancer from the Dance, and then moving to the contemporary ecogothic of Lydia Millet'sHow the Dead Dreamand the trans decadence of Shola von Reinhold'sLote, 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 Fictionsupplies multiple accounts of the collective and personal pleasures, possibilities, and perils to be found in pulling away, going missing, and taking a break.Introduction: On Desire and Diminution1. Avian, Anal, Outlaw: Queer Ecology in E.M. Forster's Maurice2. Willa Cather's Cancel Culture3. Disappearing and Resurfacing: Visions of Quel*