Forthcoming from Northwestern University Press, December 2024. Preorder with a 25% discount using the code NUP2024. 

This book posits formal experimentation as an index for evolving expressions of male homosexuality from literary and filmic modernism to the present day. Ian Fleishman exposes a tradition of flamingly failed passing that is itself a surreptitious mode of passing: the flaunting of queer style as an intentionally unconvincing cover for queer content. Exploring a corpus of films and novels by André Gide, Jean Genet, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, François Ozon, and Xavier Dolan, among others, Flamboyant Fictions: The Failed Art of Passing intervenes in trenchant debates about queer agency, visibility, negativity, and (dis)identification. Mapping queer strategies of storytelling onto queer subjectivities’ practices of self-invention, Flamboyant Fictions wagers that it is precisely in instances of conflict between these auteurs and their inventions that narrative becomes a laboratory for testing the sovereignty and self-determination of queer identity.