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.
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. The book 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. 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 20 th and 21st-century queer literary production. His newest book, also with Oxford University Press, is entitled Queer Disappearance in Modern and Contemporary Fiction, and it will be published in 2023. His first book, The Modernist Art of Queer Survival-published by Oxford University Press in 2017-examines precarious and collaborative forms of survival in the fiction and autobiographical prose of Oscar Wilde, Henry James, E.M. Benjamin's primary research interests lie in modern and contemporary literature, queer theory, and the environmental humanities.
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