“Emptiness verging on boredom butting up against wanting to die”: negativity, precarity, and affect in Imogen Binnie’s Nevada

This essay focuses on Imogen Binnie's trans-centric road novel Nevada (2013), exploring it as an archive of queer and trans negative affect. Nevada, this essay proposes, offers an occasion to excavate the nuances, losses, and possibilities of queer and trans negative affectivity. Binnie's novel maps queer and trans negative affects in relation to economic history, revealing how these affects intertwine with those of precarity. It thus registers the impact of global forces in some queer- and trans-centered worlds, highlighting the historicity of queer and trans affects. Further, Nevada is written in opposition to hegemonic narratives of transition, rejecting the ideals of positivity and self-actualization embedded in such stories. In this sense, Nevada plumbs queer and trans negativity, but in so doing, it generates a more open-ended form for trans narrative, inviting the trans subject into spaciousness and porosity. Nevada thus practices a reparative negativity, presenting a paradoxically downbeat paradigm for queer and trans survival and possibility. It offers a resource for scholars seeking to grapple with queer and trans negative affectivity and to map some resources of queer and trans oppositional consciousness in the precarious present.