life after: queer theory at the end of the world
Fear of the end of the world permeates our thinking—from climate change, nuclear weapons, and pandemics to artificial intelligence, asteroids, and interstellar explosions, the risks we face motivates more of our sociality and action than we may initially think. The end of the world is looking more like a possible reality than a speculative work of fiction. Yet there are different kinds of ends of the world, for not all are of the same order nor caused by the same things; one person’s end may be another person’s beginning. Indeed, to think with the end of the world is to imagine how the apocalypse may take place and what is to be done about it, either to prevent it or to live in its ruins. Scholars continue to suggest that we live on the precipice of the end, but my concern is what comes after; the world ends, but then what?
The end of the world is good to think with. I argue that a queer theory generated at the end of the world addresses what comes after as it accounts for not only how the end happens—often in unexpected ways—but how those ends can be the threads of something else, human or otherwise. My emphasis on something else taps into existing queer theory around futures and utopias while also introducing ruins into the fold, arguing that there is cautious optimism in the end of the world because the remaining fragments—both physical and psychical—remind us of what we lost, who we loved, when we failed, where we survived, and why we lived.
These reminders are also deeply felt by queer and trans folk for they are used to living through the end of the world and using those fragmented pieces to form something, anything. This world involves times like the AIDS crisis, getting kicked out of homes and disowned by family members, being fired or denied healthcare, and being beaten and killed, all for being queer and/or trans. And this says nothing of intersectional forms of structural and physical violence that they may also experience. The end of the world is thus a familiar refrain for queer and trans folks, but it also lies at the heart of queerness: as a dangerous and Earth-shattering praxis, queerness can bring about the end of the world. In this way, I argue that queerness is both the cause of and solution to the end of the world, both a poison and a cure in what I call the pharmakon of queerness. The question becomes: is the end, perhaps, necessary and might it be generative of that something else?
Queer theory at the end of the world thus works to answer this question by focusing on both how the world ends and what remains in its wake. It allows us to dialectically explore both the contours of queerness and the end of the world, that the end of the world tells us something about queerness while queerness becomes instructive for how we understand and might weather the end of the world and the life that comes after. It contains two intersecting strands, one that queries apocalyptic ruins more broadly and one that explores the ruins of after/life— the potential and alterability of queer and trans folks as they form new relations and lives in the ruins of the apocalypse—one focused on the general condition of the end of the world and one centered on queer and trans folks themselves. Queer theory at the end of the world teaches us that not only are survival and living not synonymous with one another, but that to live after the apocalypse is to build relationality and community in the ruins of the world. This is a political or prescriptive argument, for I explore how the queer speculative fiction I examine generates a life after the end through the formation and management of queer relationships and community.
Connecting these strands is the ways the end of the world indexes contemporary issues in the current American zeitgeist, and thus I unravel broader queer critique around climate change, nuclearism, kinship, capitalism, IVF and reproduction, cloning, geoengineering, and outer space. My goal is to delineate a set of cultural critiques of the American zeitgeist through attention to the potential end of not only the contemporary moment, but the entire world. Rooted in queer and trans studies/theory, science and technology studies, anthropology, cultural studies, environmental studies, history, and critical theory, this project contributes to broader political conversations about queer and trans survivance (survival-as-resistance) and world-building, climate change and pollution mitigation practices and ideologies, queer relationality, reproductive technologies, and space exploration.
