In response to the purported unidirectionality of the Anthropocene narrative, scholars are beginning to challenge human exceptionality, or, in other words, the hubris of Anthropos as an agent of planetary change. Eben Kirksey, for example, has recently argued that the extinction of humankind is not totalizing, arguing, instead, that “a multitude of others [e.g., bacteria, insects, and other invertebrates] will continue with their own affairs.” By pushing against “anthropocentric assumptions undergirding...attempts at epochal naming,” Kirksey asks: “how should we love in a time of extinction?” What is often missing in these discussions, however, is a recognition of the realities of embodied, quotidien life: ludic representations of sexual play risk obfuscating the erasures of extractive white heteropatriarchy. Likewise, as scholars including Stephanie LeMenager and Rob Nixon have noted, the Anthropocene masks how global climate change has been disproportionately fostered by a privileged few in under neoliberal capital, making even more precarious queer lives and the lives of people of color. Drawing on the valuable work of Catriona Sandilands in theorizing queer, melancholy natures, this panel takes seriously her exhortations to make room for a host of affects, including pain and fear, in a world of queer loss and environmental devastation in our relationships and kinships, both human and nonhuman.
This panel will perform similar work in attending to embodied queer lives and trauma in the disorienting timescales of the Anthropocene present. Though, as Jennifer Peterson and Graig Uhlin note, this term provides us with the opportunity to reconceptualize history/ies, it also perpetuates a linear understanding of time, with its cause-and-effect approach to the past, present, and future. If, however, we work from Jack Halberstam’s understanding of ‘queer time,’ which deviates from temporal frames of the bourgeois, including reproduction, family, and longevity, then how might the Anthropocenic moment be reconceptualized as a dynamic weaving or layering of futures, pasts, and presents? Such a departure from the temporality of capitalism can also be seen as a leaving of ‘straight time,’ where a trauma survivor’s lived experiences of past events are negated (Jaclyn I. Pryor), and as a disavowal of what Avery F. Gordon describes as the repression of organized violence into a past, a history, that is alive and accessible to encounter. So, in departing from settler colonial temporal frameworks that negate traumatic experiences and perpetuate violence, how might a queering of the Anthropocene yield decolonial approaches to textual analysis, historical and cultural research, and queer archival practices?
Pointing to queer relationality and time as a life-affirming, emancipatory dynamic, Héloïse Thomas will begin by framing the Anthropocene’s apocalyptic motif as both a religious and a secular form. Thomas argues this form structures the terms of the debates on being human and the cataclysmic future that the Anthropocene seems to promise. They will draw together Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017), Rivers Solomon’s An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale For the Time Being (2013), and Sam Miller’s Blackfish City (2018) to illustrate how the texts’ centering of queer characters reimagines transformation amidst an everchanging Anthropogenic environment. By intersecting ecofeminist, decolonial, and queer ontologies, Thomas’ project demonstrates how queerness becomes the catalyst for reconceptualizing the Anthropocene, allowing for the proliferation of non-linear utopias.
Following this wide-ranging theoretical overview, Lee Olson will focus on the imperialist political economic developments of the neoliberal era, or, rather, the ascendancy of biopolitical capitalism. This is particularly characterized by latest developments in the violent, brecciated history of the United States, a state rooted in settler colonialism. In his examination of two post-naturalist novels--Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead (1991)--Olson argues the authors’ depictions of survivance (to use Vizenor’s term which combines ‘survival’ and ‘resilience’) first rejects the oppressive and expropriative worldviews and behaviors of neoliberalism, and, second, develops a new historical consciousness (which accounts for settler colonialism). This ultimately enacts queer coalitional activism, adopting more sound production and consumption practices, toward more resilient and just lifeways.
Moving toward more intimate modes of analysis, Brenda Shaughnessy’s concluding presentation will address her own collection of poetry, The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019), where she pushes back on the Anthropos of the Anthropocene, what being human means in terms of archival practice and survival. As The Octopus Museum documents exhibits in a museum of humanity, created and curated by octopodes (the new dominant species on Earth), the salvaged scraps of poetry are on exhibit alongside cephalopod-driven research on human societies. Therefore, in Shaughnessy’s text, human civilization is reduced to a shadow of its former self, which puts into question the new meaning of women, bodies, erotic connection, love, and identity at this imagined end of the Anthropocene. She demonstrates Eben Kirksey’s vision of a queer Anthropocene--an epoch where a ‘multitude of others merely go on with their affairs’--and invites further discussion on how we may begin to reimagine, rebuild and protect a concept of personhood that is supple and versatile enough to include everyone.
In combining these three projects, this panel addresses current conversations regarding: methodologies to unsettle colonial temporalities; histories of violence and trauma; and non-linear narratives of survival and resilience. Such a discussion invites transdisciplinary analyses and collaborative intervention to yield hybrid reenvisioning of environmental ethics and literary scholarship. This particular queering opens archival practices up for affects and affinities, including and beyond the human.