Queer literature has been saturated with a pervasive sense of inevitable failure, as a genre in which happy endings are rare. From Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Woolf’s Orlando to tragic lesbian pulp novels, Sarah Schulman’s Rat Bohemia to Ocean Vuong’s bildungsroman, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, queer literature has been historically grounded in temporal as well as social failures to conform and succeed in a society dominated by capitalism. While contemporary queer literature has amassed a larger audience in recent years, the theme of failure is ever-present. Authors like Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel, Justin Torres, and Robert Jones Jr. have succeeded in bringing queer narratives into the mainstream consciousness. Each of their texts are marked with ways in which the lives of those in the LGBTQ community are perceived as lacking conventional success: alternative family structures, not meeting temporal milestones, and living outside of the gender binary. Keeping this in mind, queer theorists such as Jack Halberstam and Elizabeth Freeman challenge what may be considered failure, envisioning other and more fulfilling ways of life beyond the dominant hegemony.
Contemporary queer literature defies traditional conventions of storytelling, often asking readers to suspend their expectations. In semi-autobiographical novels such as Justin Torres’ We The Animals, Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater, readers might feel that hoping for a “happy ending” is an exercise in futility. Indeed, these examples all end on bittersweet, ambiguous notes that might not satisfy some readers. When reading with theories of queer failure in mind, however, readers might begin to grasp what it could mean to “fail forward.” The narrator in We The Animals, for example, experiences a collapse and estrangement from his family that allows him to step fully into his identity as a gay man. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the resolution of Little Dog’s first relationship coincides with his pursuit of a new life. Freshwater’s Ada begins to piece her life together only after a failed suicide attempt when her life truly hits rock bottom. For these three protagonists, “failures” preceded moments of breakthrough and closure, inverting the reader’s conceptualizations of what failure truly is.
Essays in this cluster explore the ways in which elements of queer failure and resistance within literary works seek to redefine seemingly fixed concepts such as sex, romance, gender, and family. In her essay “Lesbians are People Too(?),” Grace Reno investigates how, within a hegemonic hetero-patriarchal society, lesbians can be cast as failures by the prevailing social narrative due to their nonparticipation in heterosexual dynamics. Utilizing The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam, In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, and The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Reno explores how each text exemplifies the ways that lesbian relationships fail to be legible to outsiders because the relationships do not seek to imitate heterosexual dynamics. Similarly, in “Gender Nonconformity as a Mode of Queer Failure,” Savannah Harr reads Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby through the theoretical lens of Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, incorporating supporting examples from Andrea Lawlor’s Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl and pop culture. She explores the ways in which queerness inherently troubles gender performance, positing that queer people can (and should) “fail” to perform their genders in liberatory aspiration.
Other essays included in this cluster incorporate other forms of contemporary media to investigate how queer failures within romance and family structures are represented by mainstream culture. Ayanna Cabrera delves into the distinct dynamics that a queer relationship encounters versus a traditional heterosexual relationship in her essay “The Nature of Queer Relationships.” She seeks to showcase how queer relationships have created new traditions that challenge societal norms. Citing texts such as Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dreamhouse, she explores how prevalent the concept of queer failure is within modern media and literature. In their essay “Family Dynamics and Queer Failure” Rain Sparks analyzes how queerness alters pre-existing family dynamics as represented by Ocean Vuong’s on Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, and the obstacles that queer people face when defying heteronormativity while creating their own family units as seen in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Their essay is brought together by examining these two texts through the lens of Jack Halberstam’s idea of queer failure.
The authors of this cluster offer various models for what “queer failure” may look like and accomplish, highlighting the limitations of heteronormativity, and using contemporary queer literature to do so. These constraints imposed on the LGBTQ+ community not only confine queer people in their actions and choices but also hinder those outside of the community from exploring diverse notions of sex, family structures, and caregiving.