Failure as/in the queer bildungsroman

This article conceptualises the queer bildungsroman as a narrative genre that is different from the bildungsroman that simply features LGBTQ + characters. Through close reading of Douglas Stuart’s two novels–Shuggie Bain (2020) and Young Mungo (2022)–I argue that the queer bildungsroman is a specific iteration of the genre that marks intersecting narrative and thematic features that cohere under a rubric of failure. The novels are shown to resist easily teleological and linear character development. Instead, the genre of the queer bildungsroman, as I conceptualise it here, is shown to mark a distinct set of aesthetic and thematic features, a narrative messiness, that scripts disconnections between the past and the future, and in which the present is forever suspended in recursive moments of success and failure, of heteronormative constraint and queer possibility, that problematise the very notion of progress itself.