Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Queer Failure
MERRI LISA JOHNSON
This article critiques Jack Halberstams concept of queer failure through a feminist cripistemological lens. Challenging Halberstams 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.
How does the subaltern feel? How might subalterns feel each other?
Jose Esteban Mu~
noz, Feeling Brown, Feeling Down
Queer theory and disability studies are hardly strangers to each other these days. The
past decade has seen important work emerging from the intersection of the two fields,
a period bookended by the award-winning double issue of GLQ on Desiring Disability,
edited by Robert McRuer and Abby Wilkerson (McRuer and Wilkerson 2003), and
the visually stunning volume on Sex and Disability, edited by McRuer and Anna Mollow (McRuer and Mollow 2012). These collections have enriched and challenged the
field of disability studies to think about the inherent queerness of crip sensations and
attachments; the disabling force of sex as it shatters the self; the shared emotional
Hypatia vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015) by Hypatia, Inc.
252
Hypatia
253
254
Hypatia
from the usual progress narrative of medicine codified by numbered editions of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders into a nonlinear dimension of time
where all possible understandings of a psychological experience commingle.
This impertinent attitude toward medical authority permits me to invoke conflicting schools of thought in psychiatry that understand the psychological arrangement
currently organized by the concept of borderline personality disorder in a range of
waysas a disorder of attachment, trauma, mood, thought, anxiety, or brainwithout getting caught up in their competition for status as ultimate truth of BPD. Each
provides a logical and humanizing frame for BPD symptoms commonly considered
irrational and monstrous: self-cutting, mercurial emotions, inconstant attachment,
and hypersensitivity. Like other disidentificatory subjects before me, I am making a
double gesture of engagement, working on and against the medical story of borderline
personality disorder. In asserting BPD as the basis of a distinctive epistemology that
constitutes a valuable form of counter-knowledgeone example of the personal,
embodied, and relational disability knowledge that I have defined elsewhere as cripistemology (Johnson and McRuer 2014)I write in direct opposition to the undermining of cognitive and epistemic authority that typically attends the diagnosis.
255
drug time, free time, pirate cultures, labor riots, subversive intellectuals, the anti-homonormative and anti-familialall the strange and anticapitalist logics of being and
acting and knowing that harbor overt and covert queer worlds (Halberstam 2011,
20-21)it sounds like a rollicking good time in the abstract, but what happens when
you quit trying, for real? The idiom of failure is so enmeshed with actual loss for
those of us with psyches-that-shatter that I find it hard to get on board this ride. I
was not alone in raising an eyebrow at the books insubstantial attention to the negative affects that accompany failure. Hesitating at recent critical trends that flirt cheerfully with precarity, performance theorists Roisin OGorman and Margaret Werry
write, Failure saturates our lives, shapes our experience and delineates the contours
of our institutions. And mostly (as Beckett well knew), it feels like shit (OGorman
and Werry 2012, 1). Although Halberstam concedes, as he turns from Pixar to Nazism, that inhabiting failure requires us to write and acknowledge dark histories, the
book largely disregards the feels like shit dimension of failure, its lightheartedness
striking a dissonant note against the seriousness of its subject matter. I can make this
critical view sound very reasonable and decorous here, but what it sounded like in
my head was, you have no fucking idea what youre talking about. No fucking idea
became a recurring marker of irritation when tropes of insanity cropped up, or, even
more strongly, when references to self-cutting appeared.
This harsh response came as a surprise because I had previously loved Halberstams
work unreservedly. I mean, how hot is Jack? Who among us is not in love with him? I cut
my critical teeth on his first book, Skin Shows (Halberstam 1995), especially its sexy
chapter on horror films, Bodies that Splatter, among my first introductions to Judith
Butlers treatment of gender as a social construction. Halberstam was interested in
failure back then, tooit is in the failures of gendering, girling and boying, that
gender construction becomes visibleas the basis of his analysis of queer genders
made possible by the shredding, ripping, or tearing of skin that constitutes the central spectacle of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Halberstam 1995, 14041). The text
pulls the reader in with a kind of lyrical velocity, examining the strange circulation
of skin as disguise, as gender, as something that did not fit, as transformative, as metaphor for transformed subject positions from male to female, female to male, victim
to murderer (152), moving with agility between the Chainsaw series and Kaja Silverman on sutures and wounds. The mostly-in-remission self-cutter in me must have felt
exquisite pleasure in descriptions of the spectator acknowledging a wound and then
ignoring the wound by allowing the narrative to cover the wound with fiction
(153). Is that not a way of describing grad school itself? I reveled in Halberstams grotesque erotics of interpretation: Is the knife a metaphor for the penis, or is the penis
a metaphor for the knife? Is violence a metaphor for sex, or sex a metaphor for violence? The harelip is a vagina is a cut is the place where skin gives way, and all the
while, the queer body (a girl wielding a phallic chainsaw) refuses to splatter (160).
Girl, yes. Tell me another bedtime story.
Halberstam does tell another bedtime story in Queer Art of Failure, paraphrasing
Elfriede Jelineks Pulitzer-prize-winning novel, The Piano Teacher, in the chapter,
Shadow Feminisms: Queer Negativity and Radical Passivity. Yet when he moves
256
Hypatia
from the horror of splatter films to the horror of relationship drama, the flood of metaphoricity covers more than it reveals. Pointing briefly to the thematic focus in The
Piano Teacher on chaotic interpersonal relationshipsfeaturing a suffocating mother
daughter relationship, a sadomasochistic dynamic between student and teacher, and a
woman inclined toward violent impulsive actsHalberstam could easily be setting up
a reading of the novel as a story about borderline personality disorder. Consider the
evidence of ambivalent attachment in Jelineks narrative: Erika Kohut is too close to
her cold, contemptuous, controlling mother, absorbing relentless criticisms from her,
yet also finding comfort, sometimes, in sleeping next to her, except, that is, for the
time she mounts a love attack on her mother: kissing her voraciously on the mouth
and neck and then biting and hitting her (Jelinek 1988, 23233). The narrator marks
the characters motivations in this scene as inexplicable, calling Erika cryptosexual
(234), echoing a much earlier description of Erika as unpredictable: Erika is such a
live wire, such a mercurial thing (5; my emphasis). No word is more frequently used
among theorists of BPD than mercurial. Throughout the novel, Erika pursues secret
illicit behaviors: cutting her inner thigh in the bathroom, hanging out in seedy peepshows, and asking the ruthless young Klemmer to withhold all compassion in a poorly
negotiated session of SM but secretly hoping he knows she doesnt really want him
to hurt her (226), all the while hiding these activities from her mother.
Erika may sound the queer hero when she reflects, Sometimes we really do fail,
and I almost believe that this inevitable failure is our ultimate goal (207), but what
if, instead of bravado, one hears her interior comment as resignation expressed within
the context of extreme relationship stress, marking a kind of attachment depression
associated with BPD? Indeed, according to some diagnosticians, the combination of
having an attachment disorder and engaging in self-cutting is enough to justify a
diagnosis of BPD (Gunderson 2010, 698). I certainly recognize Erika as a fellow sufferer, even though her symptoms are exoticized for intensity to suit the needs of fiction.4 So it is peculiar that critical responses to the novel uniformly assess it as
commentary on Austrian politics.
Likewise, in Halberstams analysis of The Piano Teacher, the term borderline personality disorder never arrives. Instead, the emotional dysregulation that drives the
plot is transferred from the individual narrative of the self-cutting womanwho is
herself caught in a bad romance, a phenomenological experience many consider central
to BPDto a collective narrative of contested gender roles and troubled Austrian
national identity. Interpreting [t]he cut as a gesture that transfer[s] the terms of
Nazi misogyny to the female body in literal and terrifying ways (Halberstam 2011,
135), Halberstam uses the symptom as a critical prosthesis,5 recruiting disability to perform emotional labor (to open a vein, as it were) for queer theory. Such leaps from
literal to metaphorical are, at the very least, risky, a perfectly measured term
applied by Georgina Kleege to the pervasive misuse of blindness as metaphor (Kleege
1999, 145). Indeed, the rush to metaphor obscures what self-cutting is (a response to
emotional dysregulation) in favor of claims about what self-cutting is like (a broader
sense of political volatility). Let us sit with cutting as cutting, beforeor even withoutmoving on to cutting as trope of troubled citizenship.
257
Housed within my critique of queer failure is this call for better cultural understandings of self-cutting. By placing self-cutting in the psychoanalytic context of borderline personality disorder and locating BPD on the trauma spectrum,
misinterpretations of self-cutting as a hysterical cry for attention among women with
BPD might be displaced by awareness of the arguably rational and sometimes autonomic function of self-cutting as a response to traumatic histories and triggered states,
a distraction from crisis and tension release.6 Reading the skin show of the self-cutting borderline,7 in fiction and in real life, requires epistemic humility and a willingness to remain open to what [the person who cuts herself] mayand may not
be saying (Potter 2003, 5, 11). Approached from a feminist psychiatric disability
studies perspective, the interpretation of cutting as feminist aesthetic, queer revolt, or
postcolonial protest raises red flags because it empties the text of its disability content
and erodes the self-cutting/borderline readers potential moment of recognition. Being
erased within the margins of the dominant sexist, heterosexist, racist, and ableist culture by another theorist working the margins produces a particularly sharp discomfort.
On this point, I feel a strong affinity with Sami Schalks recent article on ableist metaphors in the work of bell hooks, a critic, like Halberstam, whom one expects to be
a standard-bearer in anti-bias awareness (Schalk 2013).
Is this a new conversation? In some ways, no.
In staging this encounter between queer theory and the emergent possibility of
feminist psychiatric disability theory, I am consolidating a new subfield, but I am also
simply remembering the intellectual history of queer-of-color theory, recalling
moments when queer-of-color theorists have chided queer theory for moving too
hastily beyond identity-based knowledge practices, posing urgent questions about the
applicability of theory to real-life encounters between the material body and its environment, as E. Patrick Johnson does in his articulation of quare studies. A switchpoint between queer-of-color theory and feminist psychiatric disability studies appears
in his much-cited (and regrettably abbreviated) challenge to insufficiently materialized forms of queer deconstruction: [W]hat is the utility of queer theory. . . where
the body is the site of trauma? (Johnson 2001, 5; my emphasis). Building on his
assertion that white queer theorists frequently fail to acknowledge. . . racial privilege
(5), I renew the call for queer theorists to acknowledge able-bodied/able-minded privilege as a potentially distorting factor in their interpretations of texts marked by illness and disability. Qutter theory would be too narrow to encapsulate this position,
but for the moment it helps me foreground the fact that the bleeding, scabbed,
scarred body of psychosocial disability has fared little better than the brown body Hiram Perez once offered up to white queer theorists in parodic masochistic display
(Perez 2005).
Among white queer theorists, Halberstam stands out as having attended deliberately and, I think, successfully to the call from queer-of-color theorists to theorize
queerness in racially cognizant ways. It is time for queer theorists who do not identify
as disabled to take up disability with equal vigor. Unfortunately, the metaphorical
redeployment of self-cutting as shadow feminism is part of a pattern of glitches in
Halberstams work around disability subjectivity. Consider the linguistic insensitivity
258
Hypatia
259
Speaking as someone who knows the pain and confusion of having a psychiatric
disability but being undiagnosed and misunderstood by the people around you, which
is what I see happening to Erika Kohut in the worlds of the novel and of critical
analysis, I also propose the medical diagnosis of this character as useful in opening up
a new dimension of the text. Just as normate accounts overlook disability subjectivity in iconic nineteenth-century literature like Bartleby, the Scrivener (Murray 2008,
54) or Jane Eyre, whose protagonist Rodas provocatively places on the spectrum
(Rodas 2008), so, too, do normate accounts misread the inscrutable and difficult
piano teacher. Erika does not want to be snuffed out, as Halberstam suggests; she asks
to be snuffed out but hopes her love object decodes the message hidden between the
lines. This is an important distinction. Her ambivalence toward intimacy and deficits
in interpersonal skills potentially position her as recognizably borderline rather than
queerly masochistic. It is a painful and confusing situation for Erika, and she does not
derive pleasure from this pain. Far from calling for a return to the hermetically sealed
text of New Criticism or the willy-nilly reduction of complex fictional characters to
simplistic psychoanalytic case studies, I contend that moving inward to psychological
dynamics is a political reading of a text when linked to a critical disability studies
rejection of the stigma that shapes characters and readers apprehension of attachment dynamics and micro-psychotic events. Such an approach seeks to give better
witness to the main characters interior strife than what is provided by the able-normative characters and critics around her.
A related goal is to take up the texts invitation to grapple with the intricacies of
psychological pain and improve our responses to it in everyday life. For, in the
absence of this recognition, this naming act, we self-cutters, we borderlines, are perceived as crazy in this undifferentiated way that can only stigmatize and distort.
How I wish more people recognized BPD when it materialized in front of them. How
I wish my own symptomsnot just the cutting but other marks: the abusive relationship I could not leave, the scuffed dent on my bedroom wall from the shoe I threw
in a tantrum, the beloved personal belongings I broke and hid in shamehad been
recognized in my teenage years instead of ignored, punished, or perceived as character
flaws. Standing here in the memory of my adolescent bedroom, decidedly outside the
text, I align this project, perhaps less directly, with the work of Alexander Doty in
an earlier period of queer theory dedicated to outing implicitly gay characters (Doty
1993). I seek to claim BPD figures in literature in a similar waywelcoming Erika to
the borderline family, to co-opt an LGBTQ insider term of endearmentusing my
personal experience as a gauge to sense others in the vicinity who share it. What
would be the phrase for a psychiatric version of gaydar?
Mad insight, perhaps. Or cray-dar.
Diagnosis can bring unwanted consequences like stigma or institutionalization, to
name only two, but in many cases the label constitutes the only path to therapeutic
care. Under such circumstances, to redirect a question Halberstam poses in the context of feminist transgender studies, Who can afford metaphors? (Halberstam 1998,
173). Given my own investments in experientially informed scholarship, I cant help
but wonder if Halberstams inconstant insight into this problemkeener in relation
260
Hypatia
261
romance model introduced in my opening is a useful heuristic for defusing this set of
anxieties by refocusing from the individual person to the dynamics of relationships
and invalidating environments, translating a discourse of blame that might point to
my hypersensitivity as the problem into a discourse of mutual responsibility for fair
and productive communication.
Like walking on eggshells, the phrase hate you dont leave me comes from the title of
a popular, general-audience book on BPD that presents the pair of mismatched emotional expressions as an example of the mercurial attitude of the borderline toward
her significant others, alternating rapidly, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual, from idealization to devaluation (Kreisman and Straus 1991). We have feelings that splatter, sudden mood changes splashing from up the boiling pot of BPD dysregulation. Saying someone has no fucking idea what hes talking about and then
turning around and describing that person as hot, as I do above, marks a brassy oscillation of attachment that surely invites diagnosisand dismissalas a borderline
style of cognition. I dont accept this dismissal. Following Simi Lintons recommendation that crip scholars claim disability (Linton 1998) by changing its meanings
instead of changing its words, along with Nickis argument for a liberatory theory of
psychiatric disability that recognizes the moral value of extreme mental states and
unpleasant dispositions (Nicki 2001, 82, 97), I hereby relocate this diagnostic criterion from its terrain of inexplicable pathology to a crip feminist critical register in
which hate you dont leave me expresses valid ambivalence toward queer theory.
Reacting to a school of thought that is highly meaningful to crip theorists but also
occasionally neglectful of material disabilities, the ambivalence is made up of angry,
defensive, hard feelings (hate you) and vulnerable, desiring, soft, attached feelings
(dont leave me). Instead of a simple reversal of the phrase from all-negative to allpositive, however, this redeployment acknowledges the phrase as incoherent, abrupt,
and coarse while also recognizing its capacity for expressing the layered emotions of
frustrated intimacy.
Marking this symptom as part of my critical optic in no way means that the symptom is no longer painful or troublesome, just that it is also part of my way of seeing,
and not a part that should be dismissed. The usual interpretation of I hate you, dont
leave me is simply that the borderline makes no sense, first rejecting a partner and
then clinging to that same person in a state of embattled intimacy. Yet hate you
can be fairly easily translated to mean I am angry because I am not getting what I
need from you. In its harshness, the explosive hate you that lashes out at the love
object ironically reveals an interplay between what queer theorists have called the
antisocial turn and what I am calling (speculatively, experimentally) a borderline
turn in contemporary theory, a willingness among queer theorists to jar their readers
with brash language and counterintuitive ideas into an awareness that sometimes
negotiationsin romance or in critical theorymust turn away from polite
exchange, must be willing to be impolite, loud, and messy, willing to fuck shit up,
traits Halberstam attributes to antisociality (Halberstam 2011, 110). In taking the
form of aggressive verbalizations, queer failure feels like familiar emotional terrain to
this borderline reader, even as it refuses to mark that familiarity. Queer failure thus
262
Hypatia
constitutes a site of cruel optimism for me, as Lauren Berlant has defined the term:
an enabling object that is also disabling (Berlant 2011, 25).
This turn to Berlant moves me closer to my larger purpose: tracking moments in
literary, cultural, and theoretical texts when BPD almost erupts but ultimately does
not erupt, when it appears and goes unnamed, when it structures the affective terrain
but is not acknowledged as part of the mapand, last but not least, when it breaks
loose from the BPD/non-BPD binary to reveal elements of what we call BPD in texts,
identities, and phenomena not marked as BPD, very much in the tradition of theories
that resist hetero/homo, male/female, and even trans/cis or able-bodied/disabled dualisms. To illustrate what I mean by this project of making things perfectly borderline, Berlants concept of cruel optimism could easily be recast as part of the borderline
turn. Not only does she describe cruel optimism as a situation in which something
you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing (Berlant 2011, 1), which is as
succinct a translation of ambivalent attachment as I can imagine, but she draws
directly on a book about hope as an affect among borderline patients to construct her
theory of cruel optimism as a stuckness within a relation to futurity that constitutes
a problematic defense against the contingencies of the present (13; my emphasis).
The crosstalk between antisocial and borderline turns raises the question of why the
affect of antisociality has been so easily assimilated into contemporary theory,
whereas borderline states remain latent, unmarked, or, in Berlants case, cited but
somehow not noticed or rendered salient. They are both personality disorders, after
all, pugilistic neighbors in the dramatic, erratic Cluster B of the DSM section on
PDs, but one represents the cool affect of punk rock, leaving the other mired in the
clinging, stalking, threatening abjection of the psycho girlfriend, a figure of absolute
to-be-avoidedness.
I have already referenced racial difference as a site where theorists have struggled
with problematic hierarchies of concern within queer theory. The preference queer
theorists have for antisociality over borderline personality disorder calls to mind
another long-standing tension, this time across lines of gender difference, well represented by Suzanna Danuta Walterss argument that queer theory prematurely distances itself from the politics of experience and too frequently accrues hip cachet
by positioning itself as having transcended an outmoded lesbian-feminism (Walters
1996, 840, 837), leading me to wonder, is that who the crudely literal feminist is? Is
the masculinity of the antisocial turn what makes its difficult affects attractive? Likewise, is the culturally ascribed femininity of borderline difficulty the grounds for
overwhelming rejection of the affects and people (usually women) attached to the
diagnosis? Is the femininity of BPD the reason it cannot emerge in a theory of queercool affects like Queer Art of Failure? When I find representations of self-cutting
women (not only the fictional character, Erika, but also Yoko Onos performance of
Cut Piece) grouped together by Halberstam with other fictional daughters who have
ambivalent attachments and difficult affects (characters slung angrily at the world by
Jamaica Kincaid) under the category of antisocial feminism, I am nonplussed by the
misrecognition. I have jokingly proposed that a more accurate diagnosis would be borderline feminism with antisocial features to resemble the frequent diagnosis of borderlines
263
who rage outwardly as having antisocial features or traits. All jokes and exasperation
aside, the word borderline remains somehow too taboo, too undesirable, and perhaps too grotesquely female to take center stage in queer theory. She almost appears
a version of woman that is messy, bloody, porous, and self-loathing (Halberstam
2011, 135)but not quite. She appears, but goes unnamed. And I state this fact over
and over, perseverating to the point of headaches and nightmares over this almostness. To be fair, the same exclusion appears in disability studies, a field that has
expanded in recent years to address such psychiatric disabilities as autism, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and bipolar disorder, but has not yet
taken up questions related to personality disorders, leaving me to ask of this selective
fascination with madness, when will it be the borderlines turn?
In therapy for people with BPD, the question is often posed to the client: Is there
another way of looking at this problem? Is there a middle path? Mindfulness and
empathy are encouraged to bring us out of these neurotic loops and harsh judgments.
Literary critics could also benefit from such recasting of conflict. We are trained, as
Olivia Frey once wrote, in an agonistic mode that predicates the success of ones critical project on the destruction of anothers project, and I value her call for feminist
scholars to find other ways to engage one another (Frey 1992), alongside Jose
Mu~
nozs musings on how subalterns might feel each other (Mu~
noz 2006, 677).
Toward that end, a different approach to the playfulness of The Queer Art of Failure
might mean affirming the queer kinship Halberstam feels with metaphorical madness
by empathizing with the desire to lose ones mind as an academic. Even though I
had an irritated reaction at first, I can reasonably imagine Halberstams lightheartedness as a mental-health-management strategy, enacting the same stress relief I initially sought in the antisocial turn. For intellectual workers in the neoliberal
university, operating under a range of different kinds of pressure, the appeal of a theoretical version of grumpy cat memes (I cannot brain today. I has the dumb) is not
difficult to fathom. Nor is it hard to recognizethinking of Moya Z. Baileys treatment of the call to get retarded in hip hop as a complex expression of black visibility and embodied pleasurethat the longing to lose ones mind can be rooted in
various experiences of oppression, rather than always being an expression of privilege.
This does not excuse the fact, as Bailey indicates, that ableist language further circumscribes the lives of those who are assigned these labels outside of the hip hop
context (Bailey 2011, 15253), but it does affirm the importance of propel[ling] our
thinking into nonlinear dimensions apart from a simple binary of positive and negative images (155). The borderline turn is structured not only by the principled move
from ableist to disability-aware imagery (sometimes I am the Language Police) but
also by the learned skill of mindfulness when faced with a beloved scholar who has
not yet made that shift (there are always other ways of looking at the problem).
In a roundtable on Failure and the Future of Queer Studies, Tavia Nyongo
translates Halberstams argument into a clearer and more appealing form, in response
to a question posed by an audience member about whether a member of the tenured
professoriate should be extolling failureand not just any professor, I would add,
but a member of the academic star system. Nyongo reframes Halberstams thesis this
264
Hypatia
way: it is less a question of choosing failure than choosing what to do with the failure that has chosen us (Nyongo 2012). In this parsing, Nyongo usefully separates
strains of thought within queer antisocialitydesiring failure from subverting failure
that remain indistinct in Halberstams book. So, in addition to better understandings
of self-cutting and finer sensitivities among queer theorists toward crip subjectivities,
my final call is for a more precise typology of failure. Because I get it, I really do:
sometimes failure is liberating. Nevertheless, a crip feminist analysis must at once
acknowledge the pleasures of failureembodied in choices to stand apart from social
norms of gender, sexuality, reprocentricity, and romantic affiliationand the distress
of failures embodied in lives gone haywire, symptoms run rampant, personal lives
devolving into uninhabitable havoc. This typology would go some distance toward
bridging the gap between queer and crip theory. What remains to be seen is whether
Halberstam and other queer, feminist, and critical race theorists not currently demonstrating an interest in thinking/knowing disability differently will respond substantively to this invitation. The borderline is nothing if not a hopeful creature, so I
have cleared my dance card.
I welcome the better romance to come.8
NOTES
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 scholarlyas a feminist gesture toward wholeness in academia.
1. Bad bargains are made when individuals are negotiating from unequal social positions (Hirshman and Larson 1999, especially 27, 171, 262). The argument is made about
men and women in heterosexual romances, but could be applied to the unequal social
positions of queer theory and disability theory, the latter being less well established than
the former.
2. Halberstam frequently publishes and lectures under the name Jack instead of
Judith, but has refused to settle the question of preferred pronouns (Halberstam 2012a).
I use male pronouns to refer to Halberstam throughout the article, except when quoting
scholars who use female pronouns, and I list his publications in References using his full
name, hoping to preserve gender incoherence without creating unnecessary bibliographical
confusion.
3. For the phrase the mad turn, I am indebted to McRuer 2012.
4. I should admit that I was offended when a colleague recommended the film adaptation because she thought I would really like ithorrified by the idea that my colleague
imagined I might see myself in Erikas proclivities. In retrospect, I experienced the film as
other disability scholars experience disability cinema: as a projection of nondisabled peoples imagined encounters with disability, inaccurate and dehumanizing reflections of ableist
265
fears about disability (Kleege 1999, 58; Murray 2008, 98; Sandahl et al. 2011, minutes 8
10), not accurate or instructive illustrations of a particular disorder. Recognizing traces of
BPD in Jelineks fictional character should not be mistaken for endorsing the representation.
5. Critical prosthesis plays on the well-known term narrative prosthesis (Mitchell
and Snyder 2001). Disability is, in their analysis, something literature depends on while
refusing to acknowledge either its prosthetic value or its material realities.
6. For one overview of the function of self-cutting for people with BPD, see Paris
2005.
7. Some BPD activists are adamantly against calling a person a borderline (Van
Gelder 2008), just as many disability scholars prefer person-first language (for example,
person with borderline personality disorder). I like the shorthand of borderline and selfcutter, with their implied refusal to operate according to stigmatizing views of the condition. There will no doubt be times in this article when my use of borderline and we
grates the nerves as generalizations about this heterogeneous population, but I intend
them as devices of expedience, not reifications of essential difference or monolithic, intracategorical sameness.
8. After this article was completed, another chapter unfolded in the bad romance
between queer theory and disability studies when Halberstam published an article about
recent conflicts over slang (e.g., tranny) and the increasingly popular rhetoric of trigger
warnings, in which Halberstam rejects literalist notions of emotional pain while calling,
perhaps contradictorily, for more situated claims to marginalization, trauma and violence
(Halberstam 2014a). The article was taken by many to mock disability subjectivity, as [p]
eople with various kinds of fatigue, easily activated allergies, [and] poorly managed traumas are figured as causing divisiveness by requesting accommodations (Halberstam
2014a). Much strife ensued, with more critiques and responses than it is possible to detail
here, culminating with a mea culpa from Halberstam for making a straw-person argument
against people with Environmental Illness, combined with a sort of doubling down on the
right to retain his preferred style of queer polemical humor, wrapped neatly (for my purposes) in the romantic motif of a break-up song by ABBA (Halberstam 2014b).
REFERENCES
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. Feminist killjoys (and other willful subjects). The Scholar and Feminist
Online 8 (3): n. p. Barnard Center for Research on Women. http://sfonline.barnard.
edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm (accessed August 22, 2014).
Bailey, Moya Z. 2011. The illest: Disability as metaphor in hip hop music. Pp. 14148. In
Blackness and disability, ed. Christopher Bell. East Lansing: University of Michigan Press.
Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. 2009. Surface reading: An introduction. Representations
108 (1): 121.
Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A public feeling. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Donaldson, Elizabeth J. 2002. The corpus of the madwoman: Toward a feminist disability
studies theory of embodiment and mental illness. NWSAJ 14 (3): 99119.
266
Hypatia
Doty, Alexander. 1993. Making things perfectly queer: Interpreting mass culture. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Frey, Olivia. 1992. Beyond literary Darwinism: Womens voices and critical discourse. Pp.
4166. In Intimate critique: Autobiographical literary criticism, ed. Diane Freedman, and
Olivia Frey. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Gunderson, John. 2010. Revising the borderline diagnosis for DSM-V: An alternative proposal. Journal of Personality Disorders 24 (6): 694708.
Halberstam, Judith Jack. 1995. Skin shows: Gothic horror and the technology of monsters. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
. 1998. Female masculinity. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
. 2005. In a queer time and place. New York: New York University Press.
. 2011. The queer art of failure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
. 2012a. On pronouns. Jack Halberstam (blog), September 3. http://www.jackhalberstam.
com/on-pronouns/ (accessed May 7, 2014).
. 2012b. Gaga feminism: Sex, gender, and the end of normal. Boston: Beacon.
. 2014a. You are triggering me! The neo-liberal rhetoric of harm, danger and
trauma. Bullybloggers, July 5. http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/
you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed
September 1, 2014).
. 2014b. Triggering me, triggering you: Making up is hard to do. Bullybloggers, July 15.
http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/triggering-me-triggering-you-making-upis-hard-to-do/ (accessed September 1, 2014).
Hirshman, Linda R., and Jane E. Larson. 1999. Hard bargains: The politics of sex. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Jelinek, Elfriede. 1988. The piano teacher. New York: Grove.
Johnson, E. Patrick. 2001. Quare studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer
studies I learned from my grandmother. Social Text 21 (1): 125.
Johnson, Merri Lisa. 2013. Label c/rip: Introduction to DSM-CRIP. Social Text Online.
October 24, http://socialtextjournal.org/periscope_article/label-crip/ (accessed May 8,
2014).
Johnson, Merri Lisa, and Robert McRuer. 2014. Cripistemologies: An introduction. Journal
of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies 8 (2): Pp. 12747.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Kleege, Georgina. 1999. Sight unseen. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kreisman, Jerold J., and Hal Straus. 1991. I hate you, dont leave me: Understanding the borderline personality. New York: Avon.
Lady, Gaga. 2009. Bad romance. The fame monster. Interscope Records.
Linton, Simi. 1998. Claiming disability: Knowledge and identity. New York: New York University Press.
Mason, Paul, and Randi Kreger. 1998. Stop walking on eggshells: Taking your life back when
someone you love has borderline personality disorder. New York: New Harbinger.
McRuer, Robert, and Abby Wilkerson, eds. 2003. IntroductionDesiring disability: Queer
theory meets disability studies. GLQ 9 (12): 123.
McRuer, Robert. 2006. Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability. New York:
New York University Press.
267
. 2012. The mad turn: Desiring disability II. Paper presented at the annual meeting
of the Modern Language Association, Seattle, Washington. January 6.
McRuer, Robert, and Anna Mollow, eds. 2012. Sex and disability. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Mitchell, David, and Sharon Snyder. 2001. Narrative prosthesis: Disability and the dependencies of discourse. Ann Arbor: University Michigan Press.
Mu~
noz, Jose Esteban. 2006. Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina affect, the performativity
of race, and the depressive position. Signs 31 (3): 67588.
Murray, Stuart. 2008. Representing autism: Culture, narrative, fascination. Liverpool, UK:
Liverpool University Press.
Nicki, Andrea. 2001. The abused mind: Feminist theory, psychiatric disability, and
trauma. Hypatia 16 (4): 80104.
Nyongo, Tavia. 2012. Lets pretend that everyone is dead. In Bullybloggers on Failure and
the Future of Queer Studies. Bullybloggers. http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2012/04/
02/bullybloggers-on-failure-and-the-future-of-queer-studies/ (accessed April 22, 2012).
OGorman, Roisin, and Margaret Werry. 2012. On failure (on pedagogy): Editorial introduction. Performance Research 17 (1): 18.
Paris, Joel. 2005. Understanding self-mutilation in borderline personality disorder. Harvard
Review of Psychiatry 13 (3): 17985.
Perez, Hiram. 2005. You can have my brown body and eat it, too! Social Text 23 (34):
17191.
Potter, Nancy Nyquist. 2003. Commodity/body/sign: Borderline personality disorder and
the signification of self-injurious behavior. Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10
(1): 116.
Rodas, Julia. 2008. On the spectrum: Rereading contact and affect in Jane Eyre. Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4 (2): n. p. http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue42/rodas.
htm (accessed February 10, 2014).
Samuels, Ellen. 2011. Cripping anti-futurity, or, if you love queer theory so much, why
dont you marry it? Paper presented at the annual meeting of Society for Disability
Studies, San Jose, California, June 1518.
Sandahl, Carrie, Susan Nussbaum, Salome Chasnoff, and Aly Patsavas. 2011. Code of the
freaks (work-in-progress). http://vimeo.com/20531038 (accessed Dec. 1, 2011).
Schalk, Sami. 2013. Metaphorically speaking: Ableist metaphors in feminist writing. DSQ
33 (4): n. p. http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3874/3410 (accessed March 12, 2014).
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. 2009. The queer child, or growing sideways in the twentieth century.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Tompkins, Jane. 1987. Me and my shadow. New Literary History 19 (1): 16978.
Van Gelder, Kiera. 2008. Beyond remission: Mapping BPD recovery. Lecture, Yale University, NEA-BPD Conference, May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux87EniZBM
(accessed May 8, 2014).
Walters, Suzanna Danuta. 1996. From here to queer: Radical feminism, postmodernism,
and the lesbian menace (or, why cant a woman be more like a fag?). Signs 21 (4):
83069.