Flamboyant Fictions
The Failed Art of Passing

Ian Fleishman (Author)

9780810148031, Northwestern University Press

Paperback / softback, published 15 December 2024

288 pages, 30 b&w halftones
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.454 kg

"Fleishman takes us on an eye-opening journey in which narrative flamboyance knowingly and craftily signifies any number of shifting, elusive, and evolving aspects of queer sexuality; this was a story waiting for Fleishman to tell it."—Michael Lucey, University of California, Berkeley

“A scintillating book. Flamboyant Fictions is highly original and beautifully written. Fleishman offers elegant, economical, and brilliant reflections on difficult questions about queerness and art.”—Emma Wilson, University of Cambridge

Exposes a stylistic tradition of flamboyantly failed passing in queer literature and film

This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary modernism to the German New Wave and 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 disidentification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer 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.