This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary and filmic modernism to the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and (dis)identification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer subjectivities’ practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.
Forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, December 2024. Preorder with a 25% discount using the code NUP2024.