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Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History
Feeling Backward weighs the costs of the contemporary move to the mainstream in lesbian and gay culture. While the widening tolerance for same-sex marriage and for gay-themed media brings clear benefits, gay assimilation entails other losses--losses that have been hard to identify or mourn, since many aspects of historical gay culture are so closely associated with the pain and shame of the closet. Feeling Backward makes an effort to value aspects of historical gay experience that now threaten to disappear, branded as embarrassing evidence of the bad old days before Stonewall. It looks at early-twentieth-century queer novels often dismissed as "too depressing" and asks how we might value and reclaim the dark feelings that they represent. Heather Love argues that instead of moving on, we need to look backward and consider how this history continues to affect us in the present. Through elegant readings of Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and through stimulating engagement with a range of critical sources, Feeling Backward argues for a form of politics attentive to social exclusion and its effects.
206 pages, Hardcover
First published October 31, 2007
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July 25, 2008
Feeling Backward takes up the notion of queer failure first explored by Lee Edelman’s No Future and by Judith Halberstam’s “Notes on Failure” (presented at UCI’s Visual Studies conference in 2006). Arguing that “Although many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress; despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people” (3), Love offers the notion of “feeling backward” as an antidote to the problem of compulsory gay pride. Love defines feeling backward as a “tradition of queer experience and representation” that constitutes “an account of the corporeal and psychic costs of homophobia” (4). In her discussion of this “archive of feeling,” Love focuses on “feelings such as nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, ressentiment, passivity, escapism, self-hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness [because such] feelings are tied to the experience of social exclusion and to the historical ‘impossibility’ of same-sex desire” (4). She explores these feelings through ambiguously modernist texts by Walter Pater, Radclyffe Hall, Will Cather, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Love’s aim in excavating figures of queer backwardness is “to create an image repertoire of queer modernist melancholia in order to underline both the losses of queer modernity and the deeply ambivalent negotiation of these losses within the literature of the period” (5). In the process, she argues against models of progress, queer utopianism, queer modernity, and pride-as-normativity.
I have a great deal of sympathy for Love’s interests in this text. I agree, along with so many other queer critics, that the “pride” model is flawed and participates in capitalism’s logic of progress and market normalization. I also believe that melancholia and grief can be fruitful thematics for queer theory, as Judith Butler demonstrated so elegantly. That said, I find Love’s negotiation of these terms frustrating and poorly managed. She begins by arguing that queerness itself participates in a legacy of backwardness: “Accounts of queer life as backward are ideological, however backwardness has the status of a lived reality in gay and lesbian life. Not only do many queers, as I suggest, feel backward, but backwardness has been taken up as a key feature of queer culture” (7). Love also cites the history of queers as “backward race” (a problematic use of the term race, I believe) understood as “perverse, immature, sterile, and melancholic” (6). Other parts of her argument, however, frame this “backwardness” as a trait that characterizes only some queer modernisms, namely, those performed by the authors in her study. This slippage of the location of backwardness produces an ambiguity around the term: is backwardness a queer trait? Or are certain queer figures backward in relation to an otherwise forward-looking tradition? This ambiguity is further complicated by Love’s argumentation: once she has argued for a queer relationship to backwardness in her introduction, the relationship between queerness and negativity goes unquestioned, meaning that terms as diverse as loneliness, passivity, victimization, and refusal are each approached as implicitly queer. The problematic reading of these terms is reproduced because Love fails to manage their differences. Victimization, for example, requires a deft touch; here, it is joined with apostasy, refusal, and domination with no argument to justify such a grouping.
Love’s failure to manage these terms becomes, for me, one of the major problems of this work: she fails to read the idea of negativity in general. In her first chapter, Love declares her intent to “think with [the authors in her study] rather than against them, identifying with rather than critiquing their refusals and their backwardness” (23). This methodology seems to result in an insufficient analysis of the figures of refusal and backwardness. Although she identifies such figures, and launches thorough arguments against the recuperation of this negativity, the figural significance of negativity as such remains untheorized here. For me, this is deeply dissatisfying and reproduces the problem of the queer imperative: Love has deconstructed the imperative to pride, but has replaced it with an imperative to embrace our shame. I’m all for exploring that negativity, but she has not persuaded me that it is a specifically queer component of modernism (see, for example, the work of my fellow grad student, Mia McIver at UCI, whose dissertation explores exactly the same modernist affects—passivity, suspension, etc—with nary a queer reference).
Finally, the most interestingly argued moments in Feeling Backward are, in fact, generally optimistic. Her discussion of Pater’s “epistemology of the vestibule,” for example, is interesting not because of its purported passivity, but because of the reformation of kinship that this semi-public space accomplishes. On the other hand, Love’s argument demonstrates a certain weakness here as well: her examples of negativity often veer in the direction of messianic and spectral futurity which, although superficially negative, participate in a pervasively optimistic philosophical gesture. Thus, her concluding sentence performs the very recuperation against which she claims to argue: “the question that faces us is how to make a future backward enough that even the most reluctant among us might want to live there” (163).
I have a great deal of sympathy for Love’s interests in this text. I agree, along with so many other queer critics, that the “pride” model is flawed and participates in capitalism’s logic of progress and market normalization. I also believe that melancholia and grief can be fruitful thematics for queer theory, as Judith Butler demonstrated so elegantly. That said, I find Love’s negotiation of these terms frustrating and poorly managed. She begins by arguing that queerness itself participates in a legacy of backwardness: “Accounts of queer life as backward are ideological, however backwardness has the status of a lived reality in gay and lesbian life. Not only do many queers, as I suggest, feel backward, but backwardness has been taken up as a key feature of queer culture” (7). Love also cites the history of queers as “backward race” (a problematic use of the term race, I believe) understood as “perverse, immature, sterile, and melancholic” (6). Other parts of her argument, however, frame this “backwardness” as a trait that characterizes only some queer modernisms, namely, those performed by the authors in her study. This slippage of the location of backwardness produces an ambiguity around the term: is backwardness a queer trait? Or are certain queer figures backward in relation to an otherwise forward-looking tradition? This ambiguity is further complicated by Love’s argumentation: once she has argued for a queer relationship to backwardness in her introduction, the relationship between queerness and negativity goes unquestioned, meaning that terms as diverse as loneliness, passivity, victimization, and refusal are each approached as implicitly queer. The problematic reading of these terms is reproduced because Love fails to manage their differences. Victimization, for example, requires a deft touch; here, it is joined with apostasy, refusal, and domination with no argument to justify such a grouping.
Love’s failure to manage these terms becomes, for me, one of the major problems of this work: she fails to read the idea of negativity in general. In her first chapter, Love declares her intent to “think with [the authors in her study] rather than against them, identifying with rather than critiquing their refusals and their backwardness” (23). This methodology seems to result in an insufficient analysis of the figures of refusal and backwardness. Although she identifies such figures, and launches thorough arguments against the recuperation of this negativity, the figural significance of negativity as such remains untheorized here. For me, this is deeply dissatisfying and reproduces the problem of the queer imperative: Love has deconstructed the imperative to pride, but has replaced it with an imperative to embrace our shame. I’m all for exploring that negativity, but she has not persuaded me that it is a specifically queer component of modernism (see, for example, the work of my fellow grad student, Mia McIver at UCI, whose dissertation explores exactly the same modernist affects—passivity, suspension, etc—with nary a queer reference).
Finally, the most interestingly argued moments in Feeling Backward are, in fact, generally optimistic. Her discussion of Pater’s “epistemology of the vestibule,” for example, is interesting not because of its purported passivity, but because of the reformation of kinship that this semi-public space accomplishes. On the other hand, Love’s argument demonstrates a certain weakness here as well: her examples of negativity often veer in the direction of messianic and spectral futurity which, although superficially negative, participate in a pervasively optimistic philosophical gesture. Thus, her concluding sentence performs the very recuperation against which she claims to argue: “the question that faces us is how to make a future backward enough that even the most reluctant among us might want to live there” (163).
August 27, 2025
¿Estamos seguros de que hacemos bien en resistir la canción de la sirena del pasado?
No les puedo explicar todo lo que se me movió leyendo este libro. Club Atlético Heather Love.
No les puedo explicar todo lo que se me movió leyendo este libro. Club Atlético Heather Love.
May 20, 2019
This book puts forward an argument which I think is very relevant. The kinds of feelings of backwardness found in the works of the 20th century queer authors she looks at are undoubtedly key. A calm, sombre melancholy binds so many queer cultural products, and Love articulates the reasons for this theme and how it operates. Most importantly, she argues that these feelings can't be dispensed with by gay pride. I can't help but wonder where we might take her arguments from here ...
July 30, 2011
A very interesting work, Love argues for a queer politics that incorporates the negative affects of queer experience (in place of pride culture's denial of negative emotions) like shame, self-hatred, and loss. Although the premise is really interesting, she is somewhat vague on defining what this new version of queer politics would look like in practice. Also at times she seems to universalize the queer experience, while at other times she minoritizes it. Love's work, I think, opens up a really fascinating realm of ideas about the political usefullness of negative emotions, as well as the divide between personal experience and political usefullness. Also, Love makes several very interesting points throughout her analysis of several literary works, but they mostly remain minor points subject to her theme at large.
December 17, 2010
my only quibble is that she might have taken on too many "backward feelings". i think her connection between loss and the impossibility of love was really powerful (though i'm really interested in how lacan argues that love is impossible in the first place.) however, how is that relationship between queerness and loss different than the relationship between queerness and shame, paranoia or depression? maybe it's the specific temporal/ phenomenological - i don't think i'm using that word right - implications: loss puts us in time; shame and depression might remove us from it. not all feelings are necessarily backward-looking or feeling. just a thought?
July 31, 2017
Lovely, utterly necessary theory. Love is at the forefront of this theoretical moment, speaking to a conversation on generational trauma, affect, Benjaminian flashes of history, ghosts, injury, and ruined or isolated identity. We would all do well to tarry more with the difficult historical work Love urges us to do.
January 31, 2008
Heather Love's book intentionally forces her readers revisit sites of pain and sites that have already been inscribed with 'set' meaning. Coming out is not quaint; it is still dangerous and fraught with anxiety. Most people have a level of investment in that paradigm because there seems to be no outside, regardless of any our level of awareness or level of disdain toward the larger hegemonic hetero-normative paradigms that rule our social identities. Mourning and loss seem to be part of the shame paradigm. It does not mean that the shame should exist, but that in rejecting heterosexual models and ways of being, we will destroy certain ties that are emotional, cultural, and intellectual while creating new bonds. There are lessons to be learned. Love harkens us to Odysseus (via Horkeimer & Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment): "One might argue that Odysseus survives his encounter with the Sirens: though he can hear them singing, he cannot do anything about it. What saves him is that even as he looks backwards he keeps moving forward. One might argue that Odysseus offers an ideal model of the relation to the historical past: listen to it, but do not allow yourself to be destroyed by it" (Feeling Backward, 9). In essence, Love tells a cautionary tale as central to her argument: "…we need to pursue a fuller engagement with negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics" (14).
I wanted to read Love's chapter on Radclyffe Hall ("Spoiled Identity") and her novel The Well of Loneliness. I always stayed away from that book because of the bad rap it received as being dated and politically embarrassing. I knew that Hall would say something productive though. Love takes up Hallberstam's reading of the novel in Female Masculinity while creating her own reading: "I argue that in her portrait of Stephen's 'loneliness' Hall offers us a portrait of a complex and historically specific structure of feelings…As a result, loneliness is not primarily a question of epistemology in the novel but of ontology. Loneliness afflicts Stephen's being; it is deeply inscribed in her body" (107). I want to take this idea and connect it with the loneliness of transgender identities within a queer context. The Policing and politics of identity politics is clearly a site of fissure for those who want to navigate genderqueer spaces. Many are subject to judgmental reactions when they don't 'fit' the codes/coding inscribed in queer spaces. Dean Spade, for example, in "Undermining Gender Regulation," often finds people "disappointed" and "aghast." They thought ze would be "older, taller, more confidently looking, look like a lawyer, and, more importantly look like a man" (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity 65). Spade ends the story with this cautionary tale from within: "Folks were concerned that the legitimacy of trans identity in the eyes of a transphobic culture is frequently tied to how normal and traditionally masculine or feminine trans people appear. I was ruining it for everyone" (65).
I wanted to read Love's chapter on Radclyffe Hall ("Spoiled Identity") and her novel The Well of Loneliness. I always stayed away from that book because of the bad rap it received as being dated and politically embarrassing. I knew that Hall would say something productive though. Love takes up Hallberstam's reading of the novel in Female Masculinity while creating her own reading: "I argue that in her portrait of Stephen's 'loneliness' Hall offers us a portrait of a complex and historically specific structure of feelings…As a result, loneliness is not primarily a question of epistemology in the novel but of ontology. Loneliness afflicts Stephen's being; it is deeply inscribed in her body" (107). I want to take this idea and connect it with the loneliness of transgender identities within a queer context. The Policing and politics of identity politics is clearly a site of fissure for those who want to navigate genderqueer spaces. Many are subject to judgmental reactions when they don't 'fit' the codes/coding inscribed in queer spaces. Dean Spade, for example, in "Undermining Gender Regulation," often finds people "disappointed" and "aghast." They thought ze would be "older, taller, more confidently looking, look like a lawyer, and, more importantly look like a man" (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity 65). Spade ends the story with this cautionary tale from within: "Folks were concerned that the legitimacy of trans identity in the eyes of a transphobic culture is frequently tied to how normal and traditionally masculine or feminine trans people appear. I was ruining it for everyone" (65).
March 15, 2017
A really interesting engagement with questions about what it might mean to embrace negative feelings (especially shame) when thinking about queer history, and how to hold that shame with the seemingly-compulsive need to paint a progressive queer history--and how it might be useful to consider given the room it leaves for the "tragic" figures of early queer history (esp. sad queens and butches.)
I should say that this book barely brushes up against actual queer historiography as a field (she mentions Gay New York in a footnote, to talk about Foucault and not even the historiographical work itself, but otherwise doesn't actually speak about any works of historiography) so if that's what you're looking for, this is probably not for you. She's engaging really more with queer theory and queer literary readings than she is with historiography itself, but what she has to say about thinking about a queer past is nonetheless really valuable, I think, and could really aid those of us who are interested in history itself as a practice. Her focus on texts might benefit the reader who has a greater familiarity more than it did me, but honestly it made me more excited to read The Well of Loneliness.
I would also have liked to see her use Jose Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications a little more, as I think it serves one possibility of how to grapple with what she's working with, but I guess I get to write that paper later, then. (For the record, she cites it as an important text she's drawing from in her readings, and she uses disidentification as a methodology when talking about the texts/authors themselves, but not when considering how critics approach the texts, which I found weird? But again, I am a pendant and officially the Worst because of grad school, so this is a complaint like two people care about.)
I should say that this book barely brushes up against actual queer historiography as a field (she mentions Gay New York in a footnote, to talk about Foucault and not even the historiographical work itself, but otherwise doesn't actually speak about any works of historiography) so if that's what you're looking for, this is probably not for you. She's engaging really more with queer theory and queer literary readings than she is with historiography itself, but what she has to say about thinking about a queer past is nonetheless really valuable, I think, and could really aid those of us who are interested in history itself as a practice. Her focus on texts might benefit the reader who has a greater familiarity more than it did me, but honestly it made me more excited to read The Well of Loneliness.
I would also have liked to see her use Jose Esteban Muñoz's Disidentifications a little more, as I think it serves one possibility of how to grapple with what she's working with, but I guess I get to write that paper later, then. (For the record, she cites it as an important text she's drawing from in her readings, and she uses disidentification as a methodology when talking about the texts/authors themselves, but not when considering how critics approach the texts, which I found weird? But again, I am a pendant and officially the Worst because of grad school, so this is a complaint like two people care about.)
March 29, 2020
It was an interesting and well thought out book that touches on so many important topics and it would have been four stars but for some reason i kept getting slightly bored and putting the book down.
August 17, 2023
A short book focusing mainly on three historical novels about same-sex relations and more contemporary analyses and receptions of them. Love argues that instead of trying to label the ideas explored in these novels as merely of their era, unproductive, or even damaging, that the emotions they invoke are worthy of feeling and exploring and are still of relevance today.
Though it's important to deal with complicated, and sometimes contradictory, negative feelings, and though Love makes excellent points when discussing the various interpretations and criticisms of these works, sometimes I find these points occasionally... kind of uncharitable. For instance, the idea that reading The Well of Loneliness through a trans lens would somehow easily resolve the central character's conflicting identity and feelings, and magically make it into a more positive or productive story, seems pretty naive.
Love's epilogue felt much stronger than the rest of her book, offering a deeper (albeit brief) exploration of negative affect in wider political and cultural contexts (especially Marxist and LGBTQ+ contexts). Focusing the majority of the book on fictional narratives was still interesting, but I think the epilogue was more so in vein of what I was looking for.
Surprisingly, Love only mentioned the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the epilogue, and just in passing. I think that's a major oversight. HIV/AIDS might have been heavily discussed in a variety of media, but reconciling with the unproductive, undesirable negative emotions and traumas the pandemic has caused and the shadows it still casts on the LGBT community as a whole, is seldom really discussed.
Though it's important to deal with complicated, and sometimes contradictory, negative feelings, and though Love makes excellent points when discussing the various interpretations and criticisms of these works, sometimes I find these points occasionally... kind of uncharitable. For instance, the idea that reading The Well of Loneliness through a trans lens would somehow easily resolve the central character's conflicting identity and feelings, and magically make it into a more positive or productive story, seems pretty naive.
Love's epilogue felt much stronger than the rest of her book, offering a deeper (albeit brief) exploration of negative affect in wider political and cultural contexts (especially Marxist and LGBTQ+ contexts). Focusing the majority of the book on fictional narratives was still interesting, but I think the epilogue was more so in vein of what I was looking for.
Surprisingly, Love only mentioned the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the epilogue, and just in passing. I think that's a major oversight. HIV/AIDS might have been heavily discussed in a variety of media, but reconciling with the unproductive, undesirable negative emotions and traumas the pandemic has caused and the shadows it still casts on the LGBT community as a whole, is seldom really discussed.
December 18, 2025
Like Love's chapter "Emotional Rescue," I'm interested about how we relate to the past affectively. Can we write about those “legible to us only in their misery” (48) without fooling ourselves into thinking we are rescuing them, or consoling ourselves by imagining their loneliness reflects our own? Love investigates how we could write about a queer figure who suffered pain and abjection, and whose presence to us may have been made possible by a contingency of power and social violence, while neither successfully mourning nor forgetting said figure.
This is more than a methodological preference, it's a question of how we should do queer politics. Can we risk reaching out to the past, finding and feeling a modicum of solidarity with others who are decidedly different than us? Or are those abjected figures in the past only legible to us in their misery such that writing them means failing to mourn them?
This is more than a methodological preference, it's a question of how we should do queer politics. Can we risk reaching out to the past, finding and feeling a modicum of solidarity with others who are decidedly different than us? Or are those abjected figures in the past only legible to us in their misery such that writing them means failing to mourn them?
September 8, 2023
16 years on the idea that the (historically inevitable) 'backwards' feelings of self-exile, breakage, refusal, exclusion etc. associated with queerness might be recuperated and discussed as forms of politics in their own right is no longer that radical, but there's still much to admire about Love's theorisations.
October 13, 2018
I read the introduction thoroughly but only skimmed the rest of the book (mostly due to lack of time). Overall, I like what Love argues. I don't agree 100% with everything, more like 90%. However, I think she has a lot of good ideas on how to approach queer history and queer texts.
April 14, 2019
A wonderfully nuanced critique of the queer community's impulse to only claim the positive from trash bin of history. Love makes a convincing argument re: the need to engage with shame and loss in our attempts to understand the way forward.
February 19, 2018
I think that Love's analysis is quite strong at points, but it was difficult to cohere until the last two chapters (Warner and the epilogue). I really enjoyed this book.
November 17, 2020
Informative
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May 27, 2021heather love said let gays be sad and as a sad gay i respect it
April 9, 2022
While the specific literary references were uninteresting to me, the theoretical intervention of feeling backward was helpful. It was nice to read right after Depression: A Public Feeling.
December 16, 2022
The butler did it.
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October 19, 2025 what is my life even 😵💫😵💫
December 7, 2025
Me encantó este libro. Llegué a él por una charla de Vir Cano y Silvina Giaganti. Propone resignificar y hacernos cargo de los "malos sentimientos", de la marginalidad y afectos negativos de dónde vienen nuestras militancias queer y feministas. Escrito en los 90s pero muy actual. Gran traducción de Nicolás Cuello. Lo recomiendo mucho.
April 24, 2008
Everyone interested in historical references to LGBT work must read this. It is on the academic side, however, so I don't recomend it as a casual read, as key insights would be missed. Love's look at historical references to queer bodies and how the written of people, such as Radclyffe Hall are used as the benchmark of all queer lives. Love discusses the concept of a one size fits all history of queer folks.
November 11, 2009
An attempt to reclaim all the "bad" feelings and backwards mentalities that are part of queer history in light of today's 'gay pride' mentality. Dr. Love tackles the problem largely via analysis of fiction, which can be a bit distracting. She also conflates various ideas of what backwardness or backwards feeling means. I kept getting confused as to what exactly her project was, but her intro and conclusion are strong.
February 18, 2009
Heather is brilliant, and this is her brilliant book! And I am mentioned in the credits :) I'm really too stupid to say anything more about it.
Want to read
April 10, 2012Pretty excited about this one.
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June 28, 2013306.76609 L8973 2009
January 26, 2015
Feels like a solid model for a first book. Upon rereading this, I think that I've kind of grown out of early Love (although to be fair, she has too, based on her newer stuff).
February 13, 2016
Engaging, and only occasionally hard to understand. A lot to think about in there! Even the footnotes are pretty interesting...
April 9, 2025
<3 maravilloso. Aunque me ha interesado más la reflexión teórica en comparación al análisis literario
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July 7, 2018Not rating this one, at least not yet, in part because I skipped 3 of the 7 chapters (the ones about books I haven't personally read) and in part because I'm just not sure what I think of it overall.
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