Dystopia: Queer Sex and the Unbearable in Grasshopper Jungle

This chapter draws on Andrew Smith’s 2014 novel Grasshopper Jungle to explore the representation of queerness as a locus of dystopian adolescent experiences and, by hyperbolic extension, the cause of the apocalypse. Smith’s novel satirically amplifies the idea that adolescence is itself a kind of dystopia, and simultaneously points to how queer sex is a kind of darkness—or invisibility—often “experienced as unbearable,” in Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman’s words, by critics of queer young adult literature. Austin, Grasshopper Jungle’s history-obsessed narrator, records in astonishing detail the world’s destruction by mutant bugs, yet Austin’s moment of sexual intimacy with his male best friend remains a striking silence in his otherwise scrupulous account. This chapter concludes that Grasshopper Jungle’s excessive rendering of YA’s storm, stress, darkness, and violence ironically makes visible the novel’s unwillingness to confront the unbearability associated with queer sex.