Looping Futures: Queer “Failure” and Speculative Resistance

Contemporary models of activism often measure resistance through visibility, legal recognition, and linear narratives of progress: milestones won, rights secured, futures secured through incorporation into the state. While such gains matter, queer theory has long questioned the assumptions underpinning these frameworks. What if resistance does not unfold as forward motion? What if it loops, stalls, fractures, or fails, yet remains resistance nonetheless? This paper argues for a queer theoretical model of activism grounded not in assimilation or legibility, but in failure, opacity, and incremental, often imperceptible transformation. Drawing on queer critiques of progress narratives and neoliberal incorporation, I suggest that resistance can operate as a refusal of coherence, productivity, and respectability. Rather than aiming for clean victories or institutional recognition, queer resistance may look instead like endurance, improvisation, affective survival, and the cultivation of alternative relationalities that do not register as “progress” within dominant metrics. To theorize this alternative framework, I turn to feminist speculative fiction. Speculative narratives provide a laboratory for imagining social change untethered from linear developmental arcs or civilizational hierarchies. Instead of presenting utopia as a perfected endpoint or dystopia as a cautionary detour on the path to reform, many feminist science fiction texts stage futures marked by contingency, partial repair, cyclical struggle, and unresolved tension. These works resist neoliberal fantasies of assimilation and “betterment” by depicting transformation as recursive, communal, and unstable. They not only depict alternative futures but model alternative metrics of change. In doing so, these texts challenge the assumption that activism must culminate in visible wins or state recognition to count as meaningful. Ultimately, this paper attempts to reframe resistance as a queer temporal practice; one that values looping paths, fragile solidarities, and marginal work as sites of radical potential. By shifting our evaluative lens, we may begin to recognize forms of social change already underway, though not yet (fully) legible within dominant paradigms of progress.