Tossing and Turning

Abstract

In this paper, I use a performance methodology to theorize how performances of family narratives might be queered through the disruptive or disorienting practices of collage and fracturing. Using Halberstam’s “queer art of failure” as a theoretical foundation and Etchells’s performance and writing practices as a methodological guide, I attempt to “fail” narratively as a way to explore the queer possibilities of some normative family stories. It is a story that involves several overt failures—failures of narrative potential, human intervention, and consumer products. The interwoven narratives in this paper were part of a larger ethnographic project about “consumer tragedies.” By juxtaposing multiple voices—including scholarly quotations, family narratives, and performance description—I create a fractured narrative. Such ruptures in narratives of family reveal how we accomplish normativity and how we resist it.