Queer Realities

Disidentification, Utopic Realism, and Contemporary American Fiction

Abstract

In the wake of James Wood’s 2001 decrial of a supposedly “hysterical” realism, critics have debated the continuation and possibilities of post-postmodern realism. During the same two decades, theorists have considered queer lives in relation to normativity, futurity, and possibility. I bridge these twinned inquiries by turning to José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and the queer utopia as a way to elucidate the workings four critically-acclaimed novels: André Aciman’s 2007 Call Me by Your Name, Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 A Little Life, Brandon Taylor’s 2020 Real Life, and Sam Lansky’s 2020 Broken People. These novels oscillate between the “real” and the “utopic,” a persistent negotiation which playfully collapses temporal, spatial, and affective dimensions as vectors of realism. From Aciman’s neo-melodramatic, first-person narration of American expatriates in northern Italy during the 1980s, to Yanagihara’s and Taylor’s excavations of physical and sexual trauma, and to Lansky’s revision of bourgeois self-invention, these texts demonstrate Muñoz’s assertion that queerness is “a temporal arrangement in which the past is a field of possibility.” This new queer realism is a flexible, crucial, and utopic facet of contemporary American fiction, foregrounding the novel as the site of the possible, and realism as perpetually “not-yet-here.”