Awkward, Failing, Hungry: How Queer Theory shapes my creative practice
Clare Fisher, writer and lecturer from the School of English, discusses the relationship between theory and literature, and considers how reading queer theory has shaped their creative practice.
‘Queerness,’ wrote influential queer theorist Jose Muñoz, ‘is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing’ (2009:1). I would argue that both literature and theory do the same thing: they show us how things are in a way which gestures at how they might be. They rouse us. They make us hungry.
In my PhD thesis ‘Awkward Positions: The Uses and Misuses of Failure in Creative Writing,’ and my short story collection, The Moon is Trending (Salt, 2023), which came out of it, I wrote creatively in response to queer theoretical ideas around failure. I drew on Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Sara Ahmed, Heather Love and other ‘anti-redemptive’ theorists who ‘all share an interest in exploring what the affirmative or redemptive project of queer theory may have precluded’ (Nichols, 2020:5). Queer theory did not (sorry right-wingers) make me queer, but reading it as I was coming out helped me to articulate aspects of my experience which didn’t seem to ‘fit’ with given narratives, or which I had dismissed as unimportant, shameful or useless. It made me question the relationship between the stories I’d told, the stories I couldn’t tell, and the power structures I was part of. It made me see just how much could be hidden under the monicker of ‘failure’.
Yet showing this new understanding on the page was hard. It was really hard. And frustrating! Whenever I tried to write too directly from the theory, my prose felt flat: it was simply ‘proving’ what was already known rather than trying to find something out for itself. Theory knows things in different ways to creative prose; it is, in general, a more explicit, systematised and systematising knowledge. Creative prose can never be sure what it knows, nor even of what it doesn’t know. As such, I reframed my own writing practice as a performative investigation of the queer theoretical ideas I’d been grappling with — a way of speaking back to and with them rather than proving them right or wrong.
As a result, I began to experiment with different styles and forms. I created surreal tableaux which dramatised ideas around hierarchies of human value, such as my story about apple-pickers, ‘Exnamuh.’ I conceived of my queerness as a teenage boy inhabiting the body of a thirty-year-old woman in ‘Who’s There’? I also wrote poetic prose fragments which attempted to articulate moments of queer intimacy and identity, such as ‘Same Difference.’ I also wrote creative non-fiction essays, such as ‘You Can’t Eat Words,’ and ‘Counting the Bodies,’ which more explicitly explored the intersection between queer theory, lived experience, writing and the body.
Having written this, I’m not sure if I’ve adequately explained how reading queer theory has shaped my creative practice. All I can say is that when my friend texts me a picture of TK Maxx’s rainbow kitchen utensils, I think of Jose Muñoz, and I feel ravenous.
