I've been interested in the peculiar negative valence of queerness in the course's syllabus since we read the Whitney Pow piece on Curtain in October, and this week's focus on failure recalled my thoughts in a new context. Bonnie Ruberg's piece "Playing to Lose: The Queer Art of Failing at Video Games," along a similar vein as the Pow piece, describes Jasper Juul's queer art of failure as "not just... falling facedown in the mud [but also] taking pleasure in that fall" and "getting up...because you want to fall all over again" (203). Queer failure is a "fantastic," iterative, and masochistic failure. With these pieces and the negative affect of games on the syllabus like Problem Attic, Curtain, and Queers in Love at the End of the World, I'm really noticing a pattern. It appears that, both in the lay sphere and the academic sphere, more homologies (no pun intended!) are drawn between queerness and failure, queerness and tragedy, queerness and malaise rather than between queerness and other more positive constructs like love, freedom, triumph, and change. And examples of negative homologies appear to be considered more worthy of our attention and analysis, especially in academic contexts. Why is it that queer games with a more positive affect like Dream Daddy take an auxiliary role in the course? (We only played Dream Daddy during a discussion section without much space for the critical attention it deserved. I'm also not sure if other discussion sections did this at all.) Do games (or any artistic work) need to present queerness in a negative valence for them to be taken seriously, to be worthy of study? Is queerness only sufficiently interesting when pain is involved?
The queer romanticization of failure, tragedy, and malaise is something that disturbs me, and I find myself a part of the issue. I more often describe a queer work as sublime, thought-provoking, or beautiful when it's tragic or distressing. Many of favorite albums and films of all-time (Perfume Genius's album Too Bright, the Barry Jenkins-directed Moonlight, the William Friedkin-directed The Boys in the Band, and Arca's self-titled album to name a few) fit this category, and I continue to seek out queer works like them. While it might seem like it's that there just aren't as many "happy" queer works as there are "sad" ones, the imbalance may just be because perhaps people prefer consuming queer tragedies. Is this negative valence of queerness an unfortunate symptom of queer history? Do queer people define themselves through their adversity more than their triumphs? Or perhaps this has nothing to do with queerness directly. Many of the observations and criticisms I make on the negative valence of queerness in the syllabus and in mainstream film can be made of the negative valence of Blackness in these contexts—or rather, the romanticization of Black pain in these contexts. How many more slavery and civil rights films do we need at the Oscars for Black actors and directors to get the attention they deserve?
All things considered, this makes Dys4ia stand out in our syllabus, as it doesn't follow the pattern I've described. With its playful presentation and (at least somewhat) triumphant final chapter (titled "It Gets Better?"), Dys4ia's affect is much more positive than other queer games we've covered in the course. As somber a tone as it has, Gone Home also stands out: even though it costs them contact with their families, Lonnie and Samantha end up together, embarking on a new life in Oregon. What do we make of Dys4ia's and Gone Home's affective contrast with the rest of the syllabus's treatment of queerness?