Feeling Infinite: Affect, Genre, and Narrative in Young Adult Queer Literature

This dissertation focuses on young adult queer novels published during the twenty-first century, which form an archive of literature that in many ways seems antithetical to the affective and narrative dimensions commonly represented in queer literature. Generally speaking, contemporary young adult literature operates within a literary and emotional framework that is constituted by positive affect and optimism—a notion that contravenes the sadness, negativity, and despair commonly found in the broader contemporary queer canon. Young adult queer literature presents us with a case in which a genre characterized by negative affect combines with a body of literature meant to instill hope.

Methodologically, this dissertation focuses on different sub-genres of young adult queer fiction published during the past decade using affective, queer, and narratological approaches. Furthermore, this dissertation takes into consideration the social circumstances of queerness present during the time in which novels were published. The chapters in this dissertation are organized temporally, starting with past-oriented narratives and ending with future-oriented narratives. Given this temporal logic, the chapters are also organized from realism to speculative fiction. This method of organization allows one to better grasp how departures from realism enable discussions of affect and queerness that are impossible in genres that are more grounded in reality.

This project accomplishes two primary goals. Firstly, it examines how different genres of contemporary young adult queer fiction conciliate the tension between a tradition of queer negativity and the positive affect often found in the young adult genre. Secondly, this project considers the literary and generative effects that positive affect and optimism produce in young adult queer works. While many young adult novels use optimism and happiness as a way of concealing heteronormative foundations, this dissertation attempts to understand the ways in which positive affect could mark new ways of feeling and experiencing queerness. It demonstrates how positive affect and optimism in young adult queer literature possess the potential to not only to create a sense of futurity for past and present queer generations, but also to encapsulate an enduring change in terms of how queerness is (or can be) read, perceived, and experienced.