Graybill & Guillaume/Ruth, 5. After the Idyll Ends: Ruth and the Uses of Disappointment

The book of Ruth is often considered to be a happy story. It is also celebrated as a happy text for feminist and queer biblical interpretation. However, Ruth is also frequently disappointing, as the book complicates or fails to meet our expectations of a positive female relationship of friendship, solidarity, or love. This chapter argues for the importance of disappointment in reading Ruth. Drawing on work on queer feeling and affect, it charts four forms of disappointment: unhappy objects, cruel optimism, queer failure, and “no fun.” Each of these modalities of disappointment is associated with the work of a specific queer theorist: unhappy objects hail from Sara Ahmed’s queer and feminist critique of happiness; cruel optimism originates with Lauren Berlant; queer failure is most closely associated with Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, and no fun is a framework borrowed from Bo Ruberg’s work on queerness and video games. Separately and together, they offer new ways of understanding disappointment in Ruth, suggesting that unhappy, uncomfortable, and unpleasant feeling can be useful, liberating, or even worldmaking.