Please note the change in location: Kloppenburg Room, Cohen Quad
This talk asks what contemporary environmental thought’s seemingly necessary emphasis on the future has rendered unthinkable, and looks to queer literature for unexpected forms of persistence that emerge “at the last”: at the at the end of life, at the end of a family line, as the last living member of a species, perhaps at the end of the future itself. Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, I read two periods of queer extinction (the 1890s and the 1980s) for models of care, continuance, and collective action that are predicated on futurelessness. At a moment when our response to environmental and social cataclysm often involves either safeguarding the future (as we think we know it) or, alternatively, speculating and working toward alternate futures, I consider what becomes possible when we take our eyes off that nominal prize, setting our sights elsewhere and directing our energies otherwise.
