Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction by Benjamin Bateman (review)

• Published in: Studies in the novel 2024-03, Vol.56 (1), p.108-110
• Main Author: Dango, Michael
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Cather, Willa (1873-1947); Contemporary literature; Dance; Fiction; Novels
• ISSN: 0039-3827; 1934-1512; 1934-1512
• DOI: 10.1353/sdn.2024.a921063

For Bateman, it is a strategy attuned not only to the politics of death, however, but to the politics of the Anthropocene, modeling a kind of queer underachievement that, building on the queer ecological work of Nicole Seymour and Sarah Ensor, declines neoliberalism’s exhausting drive for self-actualization and instead provides “an affective corollary to the material restraint of ecological conservation” (33). In Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, the identities of characters are canceled and “overwhelm[ed]” by the “engulfing” environment of the Great Plains, and so, too, the author—whose first name ends with the letter that begins her protagonist’s—“disappears into her novels” and “haunts them as a sort of internal death drive, allying herself with snakes and wolves that bite back at multiple forms...of domestication” (81). Theorizing diminishment not as the antithesis of form—and, therefore, not an antisocial thesis either—but as a form that we must learn to embody in order to survive together, Queer Disappearance opens up new lines of study pointing outwards from the intersection of queerness, formalism, and the environmental humanities.