QUEER LASTING

What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapseWhat 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 futurelessness the 1890s in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo heterosexuality and the 1980s spread of the AIDS epidemic