Introduction

Abstract

This work draws together recent trends in queer theory and genre study, and uses these to reflect on the pleasures of parodic critique. I open by reading a contemporary performance by queer stand-up comic Hannah Gadsby, whose 2016 Netflix performance Nanette sparked wide-ranging critical debates about the politics and conventions—and the conventionality—of stand-up comedy. These debates are a good place to introduce the key questions and theories that inform my work, as Nanette’s controversial reception sheds light on some ingrained assumptions about how parody, critique, and pleasure are related, and specifically whether the pleasure afforded by parody compromises its critique. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s conception of postmodern parody and metafiction, I explore the historical relationship between parody and genre. Scholars of parody and genre have not often joined forces, and both have tended to move in parallel with—alongside but not touching—queer theories of negativity, and affect. These theoretical silos have denied us an opportunity that my work recuperates, putting Hutcheon’s theory in dialogue with Hans Robert Jauss’s generic “horizon of expectations,” Judith Butler’s notion of gender parody, Jack Halberstam’s ludic archive of queer failure, Sara Ahmed’s account of “queer use,” and Homi Bhabha’s colonial mimicry. This critical framework reveals the intimate relation among genre, parody, and queerness as performances that depend on a delicate balance of repetition and critique, and helps illuminate a history of genre parodists whose queer eye on literary conventions has been difficult to identify or explain.