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Bad Romance: A Crip Feminist Critique of Queer Failure

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2014

Merri Lisa Johnson
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Abstract

This article critiques Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure through a feminist cripistemological lens. Challenging Halberstam's interpretation of Erika Kohut in The Piano Teacher (Jelinek 1988) as a symbol of postcolonial angst rather than a figure of psychosocial disability, the article establishes a critical coalition between crip feminist theory and queer‐of‐color theory to promote a materialist politics and literal‐minded reading practice designed to recognize minority subjectivities (both fictional and in “real life”) rather than exploiting them for their metaphorical resonance. In asserting that Erika Kohut is better understood as a woman with borderline personality disorder (BPD), and in proposing borderline personality disorder as a critical optic through which to read both The Piano Teacher and The Queer Art of Failure (Halberstam 2011), the article challenges the usual cultural undermining of epistemic authority that comes with the BPD diagnosis. It asserts instead that BPD might be a location of more, rather than less, critical acumen about the negative affects that accompany queer (and crip) failures, and reflect on what we might call a borderline turn in queer theory. On a broader level, the article joins an emergent conversation in crip theory about the reluctance of queer theory to address disability in meaningful and substantive ways.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 251 - 267
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

I am deeply grateful for insightful feedback on drafts of this article from Anna Mollow, Margaret Price, Robert McRuer, Aly Patsavas, Sarah Smith Rainey, Kim Hall, and two anonymous reviewers for Hypatia. Thanks as well to Julia Rodas, Jay Dolmage, and Stuart Murray for responding to my question on DS‐HUM about the perils and necessities of diagnosing fictional characters. Finally, a nod to Jane Tompkins, whose article “Me and My Shadow” (Tompkins 1987) authorizes the experimental choice to speak in two voices—one personal, one scholarly—as a feminist gesture toward wholeness in academia.

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