Category not showing up

I really try my best to not burden forums with questions that are most likely easy but I’m having an issue that is confusing me a bit and having trouble finding a solution.

My end goal is to display my ‘featured’ posts on the front-page.

But when trying to display just ‘featured’ posts I get my uncategorized posts.
Not sure if it is important to aslo know that my ‘featured’ also have other categories attached to them. Its my intention to just add and remove the ‘featured’ category when I want to switch up the content on the front-page.

Now I know my code works because it displays any of my other categories I have set up when swapped in there. So my question is more about categories in general.

The chunk of code I’m using is (I’m leaving out the content in the loop as I know it works and isn’t important to this as much):

<?php query_posts( 'cat=featured'); ?>
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!-- content-->
<?php endwhile; ?>
<?php endif; ?>


Thank you.