Bad Romance: A Crip Feminist Critique of

Queer Failure
MERRI LISA JOHNSON

This article critiques Jack Halberstam’s concept of queer failure through a feminist cripiste-
mological 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 psycho-
social 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 bor-
derline personality disorder as a critical optic through which to read both The Piano Tea-
cher 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?
—Jos
e 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 Mol-
low (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

terrain of closets, comings-out, to-be-looked-at-ness, and the sharp turns of camp

humor that shimmers and bites. Yet the work of this dialogue has been rather one-
sided, with crip theorists making overtures and remaining politely unsatisfied with
queer theorists’ openness to the relationship. Readers may bristle at this formulation
for leaving out the hybrid population of queercrip scholars. Granted, a growing number
of scholars regularly generate work from this doubly antinormative perspective, but
this exciting phenomenon should not obscure my point that queer theorists cannot
always be counted on to convey crip sensitivities, even when directly asked to do so.
I call this failure of love and attention the bad romance model of queer-crip intel-
lectual intercourse, borrowing the title of Lady Gaga’s arguably queercrip song (“I
want your ugly, I want your disease” [Lady Gaga 2009]) to unlock another dimension
of the desire model in disability studies. As a variation on the scholarly motif of
unhappy marriages between certain fields, or critical interests cast as strange bedfel-
lows, the uncomfortable longing expressed in the phrase “bad romance” reminds us
that desire and disappointment frequently go hand in hand. One example of this bad
romance appears in the introduction to Sex and Disability, where the editors reflect on
the “pattern of approach and avoidance that characterizes much of queer theory’s
relationship to disability analysis” and raise the question of “what is gained—and lost”
by widening the scope of the term “queer” to include “pathologized conditions” such
as HIV-positive barebackers, drug addicts, and schizophrenics, as Jack Halberstam
does in In a Queer Time and Place (Halberstam 2005), instead of recognizing them as
“disabled subjects” or “‘queercrip’ subjects” (McRuer and Mollow 2012, 26).
Likewise, in what could be construed as a request for more and different kinds of
attention from queer theory, Alison Kafer asks whether “queer time is crip time”
(Kafer 2013, 34) and describes Halberstam as a queer theorist who “approaches the
terrain of disability studies” but does not “mark that closeness” (35). Illness and dis-
ability, Kafer gently notes, are asked to do more for queer theory than they receive
in return, an assertion that calls to mind feminist philosophical descriptions of “bad
bargains” in hetero-romantic relationships.1 Bringing this latent love trope to the sur-
face of the conversation, Ellen Samuels expresses frustration with the relationship
between queer theory and disability studies in “Cripping Anti-Futurity, or, If You
Love Queer Theory So Much, Why Don’t You Marry It?” and points to Halberstam
to illustrate her argument: “disability is a necessary, though wholly submerged, term
in Halberstam’s analysis” (Samuels 2011). Crip theorists want something from queer
theory, and they want Halberstam to deliver it. I was not initially sure what to make
of Halberstam’s recurring role in this rocky relationship. All I knew was this: when I
read his recent work on queer failure, I felt the exact same way.2
My reading experience was not all harrumphing and indignation. There is a dis-
tinct allure to Halberstam’s call for “a detour around ‘proper’ knowledge,” but the
ableist privilege embedded in the invitation to “lose our way, our cars, our agenda,
and possibly our minds” (Halberstam 2011, 25; my emphasis)—like the image of
“going crazy, being dotty” that animates his concept of “gaga feminism” (Halberstam
2012b, xxv)—operated as an access barrier that complicated my entry into the
text. In other words, if we follow David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder in extending
 Merri Lisa Johnson 253

the concept of “the built environment” beyond architectural barriers to encompass

“the mythologies, images, and characterizations about disability that comprise the
majority of interactions in our imaginative lives” (Mitchell and Synder 2001, xiv),
the use of madness to signify social rebellion may constitute an inaccessible concep-
tual structure for readers who have experienced the disablements of depression or psy-
chotic breaks. The case against the madness-as-protest metaphor has been laid out as
twofold by feminist disability scholars: (1) it obscures the corporeal realities of mad-
ness as neurobiological event rather than contestation of cultural rules (Donaldson
2002, 112), and (2) “it may be used to undermine mental illness as a legitimate ill-
ness and disability” (Nicki 2001, 84). The call to lose our collective minds could cer-
tainly be interpreted more positively—possibilities sketched in my conclusion—but
my starting place is this concern that the conflation of madness with countercultural
adventure both reflects and contributes to the cultural trivialization of psychological
pain. The same pitfall characterizes the book’s overarching concept of failure’s desir-
ability and its view of self-cutting as a form of desirable failure. In making this argu-
ment, I relocate the text from the antisocial turn in queer theory to the mad turn in
disability studies, casting a different light on Halberstam’s interest in “subjects who
unravel” (Halberstam 2011, 126).3
Crip theory might seem to fit naturally with queer theories of failure, given that
disability has been described as “the master trope of human disqualification” (Mitch-
ell and Snyder 2001, 3). Yet both fields encourage skepticism toward the notion of
natural fits, so I pose the relationship as a question instead of a claim: What would it
mean to crip queer failure, where “to crip” means, among other things, to bring dis-
ability subjectivity to bear on this concept? In my case, this means reading from the
standpoint of borderline personality disorder (BPD), a situated perspective that leads
me to ask, more pointedly, is there something incongruous between Halberstam’s
playful polemic on queer failure and the lived catastrophe of failure for (some) dis-
abled people? Without collapsing the heterogeneous population of this diagnostic cat-
egory into one single experience of BPD—without even claiming BPD as real except
in its role as an organizing device currently used to reference a specific constellation
of feelings and coping mechanisms—I propose my identification with this psychiatric
condition as a salient vantage point from which to engage queer conversations about
affective extremes. I am drawn to and repelled by The Queer Art of Failure precisely
because the emotional dysregulation that defines BPD has familiarized me with the
pleasures of nihilism while also revealing the stark limitations of what Halberstam
calls “failure as a way of life” (Halberstam 2011, 171).
By crafting BPD as a critical optic, my argument departs from a central investment
of disability studies—a rejection of the medical model of disability in favor of the
social model—to build on a subfield that I have provisionally named feminist psychiatric
disability theory, comprised of scholarship that integrates medical knowledge about diag-
nostic categories with the anti-stigma stance of critical disability studies (Johnson
2013). One characteristic of feminist psychiatric disability theory, for my purposes, is a
flexible, aleatory relationship to medical knowledge, a stepping sideways (to adapt an
image from Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on queer temporality [Stockton 2009])
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 conflict-
ing schools of thought in psychiatry that understand the psychological arrangement
currently organized by the concept of borderline personality disorder in a range of
ways—as a disorder of attachment, trauma, mood, thought, anxiety, or brain—with-
out 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-knowledge—one example of the personal,
embodied, and relational disability knowledge that I have defined elsewhere as cripis-
temology (Johnson and McRuer 2014)—I write in direct opposition to the undermin-
ing of cognitive and epistemic authority that typically attends the diagnosis.

METAPHORS THAT UNRAVEL

The recent swell of scholarly attention to queer negation coincided with a difficult
period in my life when I was preparing to go up for tenure and promotion while man-
aging acute psychiatric symptoms of disorder and distress. The antisocial turn reso-
nated with the alternating anxiety and anarchic resignation that structured my
affective life. I had become so visibly stressed out that the interim Dean encouraged
me to take time away from campus, even though my administrative position requires
me to follow a traditional business schedule. “You are going to burn out,” he
cautioned. I retreated into my study surrounded by various articulations of this new
motif in queer theory, walling off the pressures of my work life with a stack of omi-
nous spines: No Future, Ugly Feelings, Gay Shame, Feeling Backward, Cruel Optimism.
Given the recent spate of writing by academics leaving academia, along with Ann
Cvetkovich’s moving elaboration on forms of depression specific to university profes-
sors (Cvetkovich 2012), I know I am not alone in this distress. The point is not that
I was uniquely uncomfortable, but that my forms of coping were maladaptive in ways
that registered to therapists and to my own mind as symptoms of BPD. Indulging in
the negative affect of the emerging antisocial canon was just another symptom, part
of a cluster of behaviors—sexual affairs, self-cutting, substance abuse—intended to
distract me from crisis while actually deepening the grooves of that crisis.
By the time Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure entered the critical scene, I had
been granted promotion and tenure, stopped cutting myself, and pulled out of the
anorexic-alcoholic-addict spiral long enough to experience terror at how tenuous I
had allowed my life and health to become. I surveyed the damage: the debts I had
racked up, the people I had alienated, and the household in disarray. Queer time,
 Merri Lisa Johnson 255

drug time, free time, pirate cultures, labor riots, subversive intellectuals, the anti-ho-
monormative and anti-familial—all 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 book’s insubstantial attention to the nega-
tive affects that accompany failure. Hesitating at recent critical trends that flirt cheer-
fully with precarity, performance theorists Roisin O’Gorman 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” (O’Gorman
and Werry 2012, 1). Although Halberstam concedes, as he turns from Pixar to Naz-
ism, 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 you’re 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 Halberstam’s
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
Butler’s treatment of gender as a social construction. Halberstam was interested in
failure back then, too—“it is in the failures of gendering, girling and boying, that
gender construction becomes visible”—as the basis of his analysis of queer genders
made possible by “the shredding, ripping, or tearing of skin” that constitutes the cen-
tral spectacle of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Halberstam 1995, 140–41). 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 met-
aphor for transformed subject positions from male to female, female to male, victim
to murderer” (152), moving with agility between the Chainsaw series and Kaja Silver-
man 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 Halberstam’s gro-
tesque 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 vio-
lence? 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 Jelinek’s 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 met-
aphoricity covers more than it reveals. Pointing briefly to the thematic focus in The
Piano Teacher on chaotic interpersonal relationships—featuring a suffocating mother–
daughter relationship, a sadomasochistic dynamic between student and teacher, and a
woman inclined toward violent impulsive acts—Halberstam could easily be setting up
a reading of the novel as a story about borderline personality disorder. Consider the
evidence of ambivalent attachment in Jelinek’s 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, 232–33). The narrator marks
the character’s 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 peep-
shows, and asking the ruthless young Klemmer to withhold all compassion in a poorly
negotiated session of SM but secretly hoping he knows she doesn’t 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 suf-
ferer, even though her symptoms are exoticized for intensity to suit the needs of fic-
tion.4 So it is peculiar that critical responses to the novel uniformly assess it as
commentary on Austrian politics.
Likewise, in Halberstam’s analysis of The Piano Teacher, the term “borderline per-
sonality disorder” never arrives. Instead, the emotional dysregulation that drives the
plot is transferred from the individual narrative of the self-cutting woman—who is
herself caught in a bad romance, a phenomenological experience many consider central
to BPD—to 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 per-
form 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, before—or even with-
out—moving on to cutting as trope of troubled citizenship.
 Merri Lisa Johnson 257

Housed within my critique of queer failure is this call for better cultural under-
standings of self-cutting. By placing self-cutting in the psychoanalytic context of bor-
derline 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 auto-
nomic 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-cut-
ting borderline,7 in fiction and in real life, requires “epistemic humility” and a will-
ingness “to remain open to what [the person who cuts herself] may—and 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 reader’s potential moment of recognition. Being
erased within the margins of the dominant sexist, heterosexist, racist, and ableist cul-
ture by another theorist working the margins produces a particularly sharp discomfort.
On this point, I feel a strong affinity with Sami Schalk’s recent article on ableist met-
aphors 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 envi-
ronment, as E. Patrick Johnson does in his articulation of quare studies. A switch-
point between queer-of-color theory and feminist psychiatric disability studies appears
in his much-cited (and regrettably abbreviated) challenge to insufficiently material-
ized 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 priv-
ilege as a potentially distorting factor in their interpretations of texts marked by ill-
ness 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 Hi-
ram Perez once offered up to white queer theorists in parodic masochistic display
(Perez 2005).
Among white queer theorists, Halberstam stands out as having attended deliber-
ately 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
Halberstam’s work around disability subjectivity. Consider the linguistic insensitivity
258 Hypatia

apparent in what McRuer calls an “unfortunate description” of The Littlest Groom “as
‘the midget show’” and in Halberstam’s “use of it as only a metaphor for other [nor-
mate] dating reality shows” (McRuer 2006, 59; my emphasis). Recalling Samuels’s
reflections, as a queercrip scholar, on the unrealized intersections of queer theory and
disability studies, I would argue that the self-cutting/borderline woman is another
example of disability being shorted in a queer theory text. “I can’t marry queer the-
ory,” Samuels explains, because the field’s recent reconfigurations of temporality and
futurity “have proceeded as if people with disabilities, queer or otherwise, do not
exist. Yet we haunt these texts, often as their assumed yet unnamed conditions”
(Samuels 2011). Samuels hastens to reassure the reader (just as I feel the urge to do)
that she “find[s] much to admire and inspire in Halberstam’s work”:
If her work were not so compelling, it would be easier to tolerate the
haunting present absence of the queer disabled body within it, an absence
which teases with the sense of how much richer her analysis could become
with a fully realized and nuanced awareness of disability. (Samuels 2011)
Like the unemployed-disabled about whom Samuels writes, BPD subjectivity in The
Piano Teacher haunts and teases but remains unnamed.
But what, you might ask, of genre? Isn’t it the task of literary critics to make polit-
ical meaning from the concrete details of a text? Recent debates about “surface read-
ing” or “the descriptive turn” in literary history may have some relevance to a
feminist psychiatric disability studies intervention in metaphorical interpretations of
self-cutting. Suggesting that we not trade the content or “stuff” of a text so quickly
for its substrate of meaning, Sharon Marcus calls this “just reading,” an act that
“highlights something true and visible on the text’s surface that symptomatic reading
had ironically rendered invisible” (Best and Marcus 2009, 12). In league with advo-
cates of “just reading”—and the double entendre of “simply” and “justice-oriented”
works nicely—I would wrest the language of “symptomatic” and “diagnostic” readings
back from a Jamesonian tradition of revealing the political underpinnings of a text
and apply the terms to the work of making illnesses in literature visible as illnesses,
recognizing a disability identity in the text by invoking a medical diagnosis for the
main character. I don’t make this statement lightly, as scholars often frown on “diag-
nosing” a fictional character. But not everyone sides against it. Two scholars working
on representations of autism in nineteenth-century literature, preemptively addressing
charges of anachronistic diagnosis, offer guidance on the worthiness of such a project.
First, Stuart Murray argues that a character’s behaviors can be mapped onto the tem-
plate of a diagnostic entity in order “to suggest different possibilities as to what these
stories might mean” (Murray 2008, 12). In his view, it can constitute “a radical criti-
cal intervention” that “extend[s] the parameters of how we understand and read dis-
ability” (50–51). Along similar lines, Julia Rodas explains that diagnosing a fictional
character is not meant to limit but to enlarge our understanding of an individual
text, and to sharpen our ability to recognize the characteristics of a particular disabil-
ity when we encounter it—marked or unmarked—“in the world around us” (Rodas
2008).
 Merri Lisa Johnson 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 subjectiv-
ity 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 attach-
ment dynamics and micro-psychotic events. Such an approach seeks to give better
witness to the main character’s interior strife than what is provided by the able-nor-
mative characters and critics around her.
A related goal is to take up the text’s 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 per-
ceived 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 symptoms—not just the cutting but other marks: the abusive relation-
ship 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 shame—had 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 way—welcoming Erika to
the borderline “family,” to co-opt an LGBTQ insider term of endearment—using 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 con-
text of feminist transgender studies, “Who can afford metaphors?” (Halberstam 1998,
173). Given my own investments in experientially informed scholarship, I can’t help
but wonder if Halberstam’s inconstant insight into this problem—keener in relation
260 Hypatia

to trans identity than in relation to disability—derives from the possibility that it is

easier to recognize and refute discursive missteps when they apply to an identity cate-
gory one has already theorized from a lived, embodied, situated perspective.

THE BORDERLINE’S TURN

Feminist disability scholars sometimes reassure their readers that they do not mean to
penalize people for using biased words or careless metaphors. “I am not the Language
Police,” writes Kleege (Kleege 1999, 41). Andrea Nicki follows an incisive analysis of
the effects of using the word “crazy” in derogatory, metaphorical ways with a dis-
claimer that she has no intention of “putting the tongue in chains” (Nicki 2001, 88).
This pattern is understandable, as people unfamiliar with the nuances of arguments
for different and better language often react angrily and defensively, lambasting advo-
cates as “politically correct,” by which they mean rigid, self-righteous, intrusive, petty,
and controlling. This dynamic is familiar to me not only as a feminist critic (per-
ceived by nonfeminists as a killjoy) but also as a woman (easily cast as nag) and a
person who self-identifies as borderline (the drama queen, considered hypersensitive,
an excessive complainer in relationships). Describing a tense conversation with
another scholar after giving a talk on the fascist imagery of Tom of Finland, Halber-
stam reveals his own mild fears of being perceived as troublesome: “Was I being a
crudely literal feminist. . .?” (Halberstam 2011, 153). Much as I want to ask what’s
wrong with being a crudely literal feminist, the truth is that few social theorists want
to be caught pedantically enforcing rules, boxing others in, or wagging a judgmental
finger.
The pop-psychology version of dismissing someone as the Language Police would
have to be the phenomenon described as “walking on eggshells,” after a best-selling
book for people who feel burdened by intimate relationships with borderlines
(Mason and Kreger 1998). The phrase limits the rhetorical efficacy of the person
with BPD, whose expressions of discomfort in relationships are often perceived as
setting illogical, impossible standards to meet. In this, the borderline has something
in common with Sara Ahmed’s conception of the feminist killjoy: in naming the
relationship problem, she becomes the problem (Ahmed 2010). As feminist,
woman, and borderline, I have learned to fear being perceived in these ways, and
my critique of Halberstam was hindered at first by the expectation of eliciting a
walking-on-eggshells reprimand from readers for making him (or people in general)
uncomfortable at the prospect of choosing their words more carefully. I winced at
the possibility of being seen as reading like a borderline: turning complexity into mat-
ters of black and white, taking things too seriously, personalizing: oh Jack Halberstam
I hate you don’t leave me. I did not want to be revealed as failing to get the humor,
the playfulness, the potential of Queer Art of Failure, the performative nature of the
text, being earnest when frivolity has been explicitly called for, making concrete
what is meant to be abstract, making literal what is meant to be metaphorical,
making serious and heavy what is meant to be frolicsome and light. The bad
 Merri Lisa Johnson 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 don’t leave me comes from the title of
a popular, general-audience book on BPD that presents the pair of mismatched emo-
tional 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 feel-
ings that splatter, sudden mood changes splashing from up the boiling pot of BPD dys-
regulation. Saying someone has no fucking idea what he’s talking about and then
turning around and describing that person as hot, as I do above, marks a brassy oscil-
lation of attachment that surely invites diagnosis—and dismissal—as a borderline
style of cognition. I don’t accept this dismissal. Following Simi Linton’s recommenda-
tion that crip scholars “claim disability” (Linton 1998) by changing its meanings
instead of changing its words, along with Nicki’s 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 crite-
rion from its terrain of inexplicable pathology to a crip feminist critical register in
which hate you don’t 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
(don’t leave me). Instead of a simple reversal of the phrase from all-negative to all-
positive, 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 symp-
tom 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, don’t
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
negotiations—in romance or in critical theory—must 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 map—and, 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 dual-
isms. To illustrate what I mean by this project of making things perfectly borderline, Ber-
lant’s 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 Berlant’s 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 repre-
sented by Suzanna Danuta Walters’s argument that queer theory prematurely dis-
tances 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? Like-
wise, 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 queer-
cool affects like Queer Art of Failure? When I find representations of self-cutting
women (not only the fictional character, Erika, but also Yoko Ono’s 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 bor-
derline feminism with antisocial features to resemble the frequent diagnosis of borderlines
 Merri Lisa Johnson 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 per-
haps 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 almost-
ness. 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, schizophre-
nia, 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 borderline’s 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 one’s crit-
ical project on the destruction of another’s project, and I value her call for feminist
scholars to find other ways to engage one another (Frey 1992), alongside Jos
e
Mu~ noz’s 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 one’s mind as an academic. Even though I
had an irritated reaction at first, I can reasonably imagine Halberstam’s lighthearted-
ness as a mental-health-management strategy, enacting the same stress relief I ini-
tially 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 theo-
retical version of grumpy cat memes (“I cannot brain today. I has the dumb”) is not
difficult to fathom. Nor is it hard to recognize—thinking of Moya Z. Bailey’s treat-
ment of the call to “get retarded” in hip hop as a complex expression of black visibil-
ity and embodied pleasure—that the longing to lose one’s 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 cir-
cumscribes the lives of those who are assigned these labels outside of the hip hop
context” (Bailey 2011, 152–53), but it does affirm the importance of “propel[ling] our
thinking into nonlinear dimensions” apart from a simple binary of positive and nega-
tive 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 Nyong’o
translates Halberstam’s 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 failure”—and not just any professor, I would add,
but a member of the academic star system. Nyong’o reframes Halberstam’s thesis this
264 Hypatia

way: “it is less a question of choosing failure than choosing what to do with the fail-
ure that has chosen us” (Nyong’o 2012). In this parsing, Nyong’o usefully separates
strains of thought within queer antisociality—desiring failure from subverting failure—
that remain indistinct in Halberstam’s 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 failure—embodied in choices to stand apart from social
norms of gender, sexuality, reprocentricity, and romantic affiliation—and 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 demon-
strating an interest in thinking/knowing disability differently will respond substan-
tively 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 scholarly—as a feminist gesture toward wholeness in academia.
1. Bad bargains are made when individuals are negotiating from unequal social posi-
tions (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 adap-
tation because she thought I would really like it—horrified by the idea that my colleague
imagined I might see myself in Erika’s proclivities. In retrospect, I experienced the film as
other disability scholars experience disability cinema: as a projection of nondisabled peo-
ple’s imagined encounters with disability, inaccurate and dehumanizing reflections of ableist
 Merri Lisa Johnson 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 Jelinek’s fictional character should not be mistaken for endorsing the representa-
tion.
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 “self-
cutter,” with their implied refusal to operate according to stigmatizing views of the condi-
tion. 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, intra-
categorical 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 trau-
mas” 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 pur-
poses) in the romantic motif of a break-up song by ABBA (Halberstam 2014b).

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