English

Queer Lasting: Ecologies Of Care For A Dying World

What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse What does it mean to be at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? To be “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, but what would it mean if only the lasting remained? When faced with the abrupt end to the continuities of ecology and nature, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the ‘future.’ Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She turns to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of the present. Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—persisting and ending—are constitutively intertwined, Sarah Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the

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