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What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse

Image courtesy of interviewee. November 12, 2024

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This video is a detailed reflection on the intersections of environmental thought and queer studies, emphasizing the concept of futurity in both fields. The author discusses how the critical focus on the future, prevalent in environmentalism, has intensified amid contemporary crises. This video focus prioritizes imagining and working toward future possibilities, often overshadowing alternative ways of relating to time and existence. The author argues that, particularly in queer contexts, there are meaningful practices of care and community that can thrive even in terminal conditions or when the prospect of a future seems bleak.

They suggest that a discourse focused solely on saving or envisioning the future might limit our understanding of what is possible. Instead, they advocate for recognizing the potential in "lasting," a term that encompasses both the persistence of communities and the complexities of existing in a present that may not lead to a brighter future. The book draws from historical moments of queer extinction—namely, the American 1890s and the AIDS crisis of the 1980s—highlighting how these periods reflect both threats to queer life and the resilience that emerges from them.

The author argues for a model that intertwines notions of queerness and environmentalism, suggesting that these fields cannot be thought of separately. They encourage a broader understanding of community and existence, one that acknowledges the significance of temporary, non-monumental interactions and relationships that sustain life in varied forms, even amid decline or crisis. Ultimately, the piece posits that change and possibility are achievable not just through a focus on the future, but by engaging with the present and the histories that shape our existence.

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Here are five key points derived from the video:

1. **Environmentalism and Futurity**: The video discusses a significant consensus in environmental thought, which emphasizes the importance of focusing on future possibilities. This unique aspect of environmentalism stems from its underlying concern for the future of the planet itself, especially as various crises heighten the urgency of future-oriented thinking within activism and critical discourse.

2. **Questioning the Consensus**: The author questions the dominant emphasis on futurity in environmental and activist practices, suggesting that this focus may overshadow other possible forms of care, community, and collective action that could emerge when future-oriented thinking is minimized or reimagined.

3. **Queer Life and Terminal Conditions**: The video draws on scenes from queer life, particularly experiences of terminal illness, to highlight alternative forms of existence and collective endeavors that do not prioritize a reach toward the future. Instead, these experiences can lead to creative practices of care and world-making in the present.

4. **Intertwined Lives of Queer and Environmental Thought**: The author argues for an understanding of queer culture as a practice of existing in "terminal regions," where notions of lasting and persistence are intertwined with the lifecycle of communities and species. By examining queer literature alongside environmental crises, the video reveals unexpected parallels and connections between the struggles of queer communities and contemporary ecological challenges.

5. **Recognizing Indirect Persistence**: The discussion emphasizes the significance of temporary encounters and forms of social connection that may not be monumentally future-oriented but are essential to the vitality of community life. By acknowledging the value of collateral benefits and shared experiences, the author asserts that these modes of persistence can cultivate hope and care even amidst decay or diminishment.

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Here are some key quotes and themes extrapolated from the video you :

1. **Emergence and Questioning**:
- "I would begin by saying this book essentially emerged from a fairly simple place and then took a complex turn."
- "I began to question what is essentially a clear consensus within environmental thought."

2. **Focus on Futurity**:
- "While all political movements by definition have to focus on the future, environmentalism long has been unique because it focuses on the future of the future itself."
- "The more imperiled the future seems to become, the more the idea of futures and futurity come to animate our critical and our activist practice."

3. **Critique of Environmental Consensus**:
- "What possibilities for care and community and collective action have been cast into shadow by our sense that we must be thinking about the future?"

4. **Terminal Conditions and Queer Life**:
- "I've long been immersed in scenes from queer life and history where the possibility of reaching the future is off the table."
- "These terminal conditions often become sites of creative care and world making and collective endeavor."

5. **Queer Lasting**:
- "Queer lasting is something of a compound word... it suggests the possibility of persisting, of going on… not by reaching or working toward a future, but by inhabiting wholly different grammars of relation."

6. **Historical Convideo**:
- "I think of them as unexpected echoes, both historically, politically, and... literarily."
- "In the 1890s... the codifying of sexuality... brought to an end certain forms of queer affiliation."

7. **AIDS and Extinction**:
- "During the AIDS crisis... often linked the experience of confronting to the predicament of being an endangered species."
- "This body of work offers an archive of species extinction written from within."

8. **Environment and Queerness**:
- "There’s a fundamental fissure between those two discourses... the conditions of life that at least mainstream environmentalism has always often are the condition or precondition of queer life and activism."

9. **Reading as Ethical Practice**:
- "Rather than entering a debate about whether reading can save the world, this book is instead offering queer reading as an ethical practice..."

10. **Temporary Encounters**:
- "These temporary encounters often have indirect effects and yield a mode of cultural and civic persistence."

11. **Collaboration and Connection**:
- "Collateral, to go back to etymology, means to be together beside... collateral forms of social relation... a great deal of the strength of our social fabric comes not simply from focusing on what's in front of us."

These quotes encapsulate the author's exploration of the intersections between queer life, environmental thought, and the nature of futures in the convideo of societal crises. The video critiques the predominant focus on the future in environmental movements, suggesting a richer understanding of existence and community can be found in terminal conditions and queer practices of "lasting."

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I would begin by saying this book essentially emerged from

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a fairly simple place

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and then took a, a complex turn, which is

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that it emerged when I noticed,

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and then more importantly began to question

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what is essentially a clear consensus within

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environmental thought.

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Um, so although it's quite difficult to state any truth,

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obviously about an environmental movement

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that has tremendous range, I think it's safe to say

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that one thing that unites virtually all

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of the practices sheltering under that general umbrella

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of environmentalism is a, a shared

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or common emphasis on futurity.

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And so the literary scholars, Cheryl Lasley

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and Susie O'Brien have made a really interesting observation

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that while all political movements by definition have

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to focus on the future,

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environmentalism long has been unique

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because it focuses on the future of the future itself,

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have a kind of red redoubled emphasis on futurity.

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And this has certainly been true

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of environmental thoughts since its inception.

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Um, but in recent years as various crises

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of our time have deepened,

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and as critical conversations have attended more

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and more to the intersection across

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and between various social

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and environmental harms,

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I think this consensus has actually only strengthened

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that we have to be thinking about the future

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working toward the future.

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So the other way to say this, I think even more clearly is

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that the more imperiled the future seems to become,

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the more the idea of futures

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and futurity, come to animate our critical

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and our activist practice,

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which also means in an interesting way that the structure

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of liberatory thought, has come to take on

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that structure of environmental thought,

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meaning it's very concerned with the future

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of the future itself.

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So a few examples, and then I'll talk about why it matters.

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Um, you can think about the frequency

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with which we see the term futures

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or future appearing on protest signs such

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as people holding up signs saying the future is queer

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or the future is female.

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Um, we see this in research initiatives,

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especially in the US focusing on everything from trans

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futures to digital futures, to environmental futures.

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And we see this importantly in a huge range of book titles.

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Um, in my own field literary studies,

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so including Amy Bang's, important book, migrant Futures,

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Kerik Healings book, queer Time Black Futures,

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Jerry Canavan's Collection, uneven Futures.

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Um, and so I think in the face of a future that

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so often feels imperiled, uncertain, receding, bleak,

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it seems like we have agreed implicitly that our task

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as critics and activists is either to save the future

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as it is on the one hand, or to speculate and imagine

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and engender new ones on the other.

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All of this work, all of these projects are,

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let me be very clear,

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incredibly important, critically compelling.

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I have found them galvanizing both

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intellectually and politically.

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Um, but I'm also quite curious about what this kind of,

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seemingly necessary emphasis on the future has rendered

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unthinkable, which is to say, what possibilities

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for care and community

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and collective action, have been cast into shadow

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by our sense that we must be thinking about the

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future at all costs.

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And let me just say briefly by way of closing this answer,

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part of why I ask such a question and,

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and question this consensus is

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that I've long been immersed in and interested in

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and invested in, scenes from queer life

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and history where the possibility

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of reaching the future is off the table.

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Um, and far from leading simply to resignation or loss

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or nihilism or mourning,

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these terminal conditions including terminal illness.

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But certainly not just that.

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Um, these conditions often become sites of creative care

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and world making and collective endeavor.

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Um, and I think part of

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what they teach us is show us is the possibility,

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of persisting, of going on, right?

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Not by reaching or working toward a future,

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but by inhabiting wholly different grammars of relation,

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both to each other and to, the structure of time,

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the time of the world itself.

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Um, and this might take us back

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to the word we used in the question,

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which is the word featurelessness,

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which I think can be understood in two senses.

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One is just as a compound word, featurelessness as in

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what do we do when we don't have a future,

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amidst these various crises,

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but we can also potentially understand it

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as two separate words, right?

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Um, future ness, which is to say, part of what I'm asking,

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is what we can see or think or do or imagine

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or be together when the future simply exerts less

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of a gravitational pull on our imaginaries.

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Um, so I think that the text

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and the scenes that I'm engaging in this book,

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they're neither embracing nor rejecting the future.

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Um, rather they're simply relatively uninterested in it.

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Um, even and especially at moments when you might think the

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need to reach a future should loom large.

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It's a word, a term lasting who's kind of, complexity

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and heterogeneity I've just been noticing across a wide

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range of queer literature and thinking across periods.

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Um, so I can explain what it means in the case of this book,

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which is that queer lasting is something of, we could think

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of it as the animating pun, of the book

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and the queer text that interest me.

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Um, all of which,

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and I'll say more about examples later, all of which attend

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to what it means to live at the end of life, at the end

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of a family line, at or as the end of a species

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or even at the end of the future itself.

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All of those experiences can be summed up in a single phrase

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that I love, that was fairly common in late 19th

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century American literature.

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And that I first found in the work

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of the American regionalist, fiction writer, Sarah

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or jut, who called this the experience

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of being at the last.

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Um, and she was referring most often to the experience

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of sitting at Deathbeds,

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but it was certainly a term applicable beyond that.

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And the more that I sat with this phrase at the last,

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the more I realized that queer life, which, is a mode

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of collective existence that historically

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and presently, has been defined at least in part

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by non reproductive sexualities, is a way of life

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that's often spent, at the last, which also means

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that queer lifelong has involved

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or required making that condition of being at

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or near an end being at the last

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into an affirmative practice, right?

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A practice of world making

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and going on, which is to say,

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I think queerness is in part about the work

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of lasting in the sense of learning

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to live in these terminal regions.

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Um, but then of course, the, the verb to last, right?

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Also of course has a more conventional meaning,

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which is simply meaning to persist, how things last.

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And so I think the, the book is defining queer culture,

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as a mode of existence

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and a communal way of being in which these two forms

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of lasting, ending on the one hand

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and persisting on the other, are not opposed

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and not antithetical, but are constituently intertwined.

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And so one question of the book is

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what environmental thought,

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and then these kind of related forms of liberatory thought

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and practice, which have so often been dominated

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by the presumption that we need to embrace these logics

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of futures and think about the future

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can learn from this ongoing

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and really trans historical project of queer lasting,

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which is itself the work of going on,

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otherwise going on differently.

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Um, and on a kind of nerdy English teacher note,

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also just note, and this is a big part of the book,

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it this might not be the most interesting

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part for your audience.

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Um, there's also an important difference between future

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or futures as a static noun, which is something we relate to

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through these strong transitive directed acts

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that render the future a direct object.

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So we save the future, we protect the future.

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We imagine the future, we reject the future,

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we might today find ourselves fearing the future.

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Um, there's a difference between that structure,

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that grammatical mode of relation

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and lasting, which is by contrast not a stable noun

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that is the direct object

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of our conscious acts, but it's a jar.

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Uh, it's ongoing. It's less locatable, it's more ephemeral,

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which means it's somewhat harder to pin down

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and also somewhat harder to notice culturally.

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And that's part of the point.

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So lasting, I hope, I think invites us

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to consider a much broader range of actions and relations

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and a much broader range of literary texts

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and cultural scenes as relevant to figuring out

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how we go on individually

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And collectively and communally when it feels

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as I think it often does, late in the world.

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The book is built around two periods

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that I've deemed periods of queer extinction,

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and that I think of as unexpected echoes of each other.

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And I think of them as unexpected echoes, both historically,

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politically, and for my purpose is more important literarily

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and kind of what the literary text of that period,

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entailed, and the ways their forms reflect the kind

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of crises of their moment.

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So the first, and I'll be brief here since it's not the AIDS

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moment, is actually the American 1890s.

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Um, and I'm saying American

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'cause of my literary examples,

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but the historical point is beyond the American context.

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So in the 1890s when the codifying of sexuality, right,

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meaning the birth of the homosexual as a species

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to borrow KO's famous phrase, the taxonomizing

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of sexuality, many scholars have observed, brought to an end

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or at least rendered invisible

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and legible modes of queer affiliation

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and queer life that were irreducible

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to those newly taxonomizing categories.

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You have the kind of extinction of certain forms of relation

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and possibilities, certain ways of life.

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And then second to get to your question, the 1980s, kind

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of long 1980s when the AIDS epidemic in the United States

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and of course beyond, threatened the total loss

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of gay life, people felt that

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and also of specific queer ways of life,

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mainly the sexual practices by which queer culture

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and especially gay male gay culture,

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essentially re reproduced itself culturally.

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Um, and one, there's many things to say about this.

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I'll just give two points or examples.

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Uh, when AIDS is discussed retrospectively in terms

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of the scope of the crisis, it's often described

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by critics in terms of apocalypse.

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And this was true at the time too.

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Susan Sontag famously described it, in terms

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of apocalypse from now on.

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But if you go back to the literature, of HIV

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and aids, many HIV positive writers at the time

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actually linked the experience of confronting

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that mass death and kind of living through that mass death

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to the predicament of being an endangered species.

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Um, so thinking of it in terms

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of extinction versus apocalypse,

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and one argument of the chapters I have in the book on AIDS

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literature is that this body of work, offers

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and this is kind of remarkable

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and uncanny, an archive

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of species extinction written from within.

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And I'm using species deliberately to go back to

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that fuco line about the homosexual as a species.

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Um, but an archive of species extinction written from within

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is something that many environmental thinkers have deemed

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impossible for a variety of fairly obvious reasons,

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including we think of extinction,

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vis-a-vis non-human species who don't write literature.

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We assume that we can't experience our own death

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or our own, status as a species,

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and so species level death would seem impossible.

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Um, but this really is a kind of archive

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that I think is getting us there.

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Um, and then relatedly

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or furthermore, whereas many eco critics

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and environmental thinkers who are engaging the topic

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of extinction tend to understand the role

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of writing extinction

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and writing about extinction to be focused on the work of,

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again, producing futures or propagating

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or amplifying life via the logic of producing more life

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through writing in the face of death.

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These authors that I'm reading, writing in the the heart

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of the AIDS crisis often find their source of possibility

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and the sight of ongoingness not in futures

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and not actually in life,

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but in these owly, strangely residual

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or even backward processes, such as a number

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of them use linguistic etymology, to rethink

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how the dead persist in the living.

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And that can be like the dead Latin root in the English

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term or other forms.

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And they often also often look less toward the future,

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for possibility than consider what it means

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to look toward the unrealized possibilities of the past.

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Um, and so in the process, I think

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what they're doing is recalibrating our sense of where

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to look for possibility,

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and openings in the face of various endings,

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and also fundamentally remaking our understanding

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of the kinship between the living and the dead.

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Um, and then just briefly with regard to AIDS on a,

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a more historical note, I think it's also worth noting

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that the period when AIDS crescendoed in the us,

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so again, the 1980s is also interestingly,

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and by coincidence, largely

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also the period at which many Americans began

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to become more acutely aware of climate change

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species endangerment and the like.

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Um, and this is maybe already evident in my point

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that many AIDS writers were thinking actively about

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extinction species extinction.

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And it may also be worth saying as a kind of side note,

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but it's important to the book.

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Um, but there's also a, a pretty robust body of aids writing

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that thinks through the pan, the experience of, living

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through the epidemic via the language of radioactivity

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and fallout that had entered the lexicon

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after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

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Um, but if these examples suggest that there's a kind

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of affirmative homology or resonance

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or even reciprocity between queer life

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and environmental thought, I think it's also important

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to acknowledge in that period

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and beyond, a kind of fundamental fissure

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between those two discourses.

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Um, in part because the conditions of life

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that at least mainstream environmentalism has always,

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or often most feared, actually, ironically,

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but powerfully often are the condition

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or precondition of queer life and activism.

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So one kind of clear example to crystallize this,

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near the end of the end of nature,

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bill McKibben's 1989 book, that's widely thought

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to be the first text that introduced, Americans

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to the idea of global climate change.

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Um, near the end of that book, he's trying to diagnose

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what makes Americans reluctant environmental stewards

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and his, account is

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that the planet is terminally ill in 89,

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and that he says, Americans don't readily make friends

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with the terminally ill.

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And on the one hand,

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this comment seems straightforward enough in his context

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and in the context of an environmental movement that is

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for clear reasons invested in health and life and futurity

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and saving the earth.

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So if we want to save the earth, right,

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what could be more defeating than an earth

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that is terminal and cannot be saved?

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But if we return to that historical context in 1989,

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that's the end of the decade when AIDS was first ravaging

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and transforming the queer community.

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And in that period, tens of thousands of Americans,

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if not more, were precisely making friends

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with the terminally ill

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and creating transformative forms of care,

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and activism in the process.

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And so part of what's interesting

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to me is thinking these things together clearly.

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Um, and I'll just say there's a kind

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of overdetermined debate in literary studies,

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coming not from scholars themselves,

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but I think from those who are questioning the role

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of the humanities and the overdetermined debate is often,

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can reading save the world, right?

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Um, and I would say rather than entering a debate,

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an overdetermined debate about whether reading can save the

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world, this book

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of mine is instead offering queer reading

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as a ethical practice that's keenly attuned to what remains

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and becomes possible when things, bodies,

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literary modes, the planet itself can't be saved,

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but continuing is still possible.

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Change is still possible,

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and we don't have to reduce that to the possibility

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of saving the world to make a difference.

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This is another one of these gestures

365
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that's counterintuitive until you start to make it.

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And then I think it, it makes sense, which is,

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so I said about aids, the period of extinction that one of

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that it was both about the threat to life

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and the threat to specific ways of life.

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Um, and one of the ways of life under, under threat

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during the AIDS crisis, of course,

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was something like gay male cruising

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and the forms of fleeting, anonymous promiscuous intimacy

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that that cultural practice involved, and involves.

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And on the one hand, such practices

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of cruising are important precisely

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because of their temporariness, right?

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Precisely because of their refusal of monogamy, longevity,

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state sanctioned relation monumentality and the like.

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Um, on the other hand, when you sit with some

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of the most thorough going

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and boldly theorized accounts of this cultural practice,

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especially from, the kind of long DeRay

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of aids in the us,

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so one example is Samuel Delaney's book Times Square

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Red Times Square Blue.

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Um, you can also really see

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how these temporary encounters a validly deliberately

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temporary encounters spread and persist

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and ramify across the spaces and lives

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and communities in which they take place, right?

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It's not that the encounter itself needs to persist

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or the relationship itself needs to persist,

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but these temporary encounters often have indirect effects

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and yields a mode of, cultural and kind of, civic

396
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and environmental persistence

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and significance that becomes totally illegible

398
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and totally unimportant when our focus is on

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these monumental futures.

400
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Um, but it's a mode of persistence that proves

401
00:18:39.805 --> 00:18:42.925
absolutely integral to the thriving of communities,

402
00:18:43.195 --> 00:18:46.085
that health, to use that word, kind

403
00:18:46.085 --> 00:18:49.565
of deliberately self-consciously of urban environments,

404
00:18:49.705 --> 00:18:52.365
in a way that matters well beyond the contours

405
00:18:52.505 --> 00:18:54.405
of any one subculture itself.

406
00:18:54.865 --> 00:18:56.285
Um, and one thing in particular

407
00:18:56.355 --> 00:18:59.645
that Delaney's text helps succeed, I think,

408
00:18:59.705 --> 00:19:02.965
is the importance of something like collateral benefit.

409
00:19:03.745 --> 00:19:05.125
So we tend to think of collateral

410
00:19:05.305 --> 00:19:06.725
as a word involving damage.

411
00:19:06.945 --> 00:19:11.045
Um, but collateral, to go back to etymology, means

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to be together beside, essentially to be beside together.

413
00:19:15.085 --> 00:19:17.525
Helene's text really helps us see both in its content

414
00:19:17.625 --> 00:19:20.085
and in its form, which is to abutting essays.

415
00:19:20.085 --> 00:19:21.525
They often have sidebars.

416
00:19:22.035 --> 00:19:24.285
They focus on these modes of indirect relation.

417
00:19:24.825 --> 00:19:27.005
Um, is that it helps us see the importance

418
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of collateral benefit collateral forms of social relation.

419
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And it reminds us, I think, in a really important way

420
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for right now, that a great deal of the strength

421
00:19:37.465 --> 00:19:38.765
of our social fabric

422
00:19:39.385 --> 00:19:42.525
and of the work that we're doing, to strive towards

423
00:19:42.625 --> 00:19:45.885
and through alternate worlds, comes not,

424
00:19:45.905 --> 00:19:49.245
or at least not simply from focusing on what's in front

425
00:19:49.245 --> 00:19:53.725
of us, but also, and especially from taking seriously who

426
00:19:53.725 --> 00:19:55.965
and what is beside us, in the present.

427
00:19:56.625 --> 00:19:59.445
And so I think one thing to kind of bring it back

428
00:19:59.445 --> 00:20:02.485
to the overarching question, one thing that all

429
00:20:02.545 --> 00:20:03.845
of the texts I look at,

430
00:20:04.105 --> 00:20:08.045
but especially these texts about temporariness, reveal,

431
00:20:08.265 --> 00:20:10.005
are these forms of lasting

432
00:20:10.145 --> 00:20:11.925
and persistence that run counter

433
00:20:12.105 --> 00:20:15.685
to any monumentalize understanding of the future,

434
00:20:15.875 --> 00:20:18.525
including we see beings or experiences

435
00:20:18.665 --> 00:20:22.445
or communities that can persist in the form

436
00:20:22.465 --> 00:20:24.685
of their own diminishment or decay.

437
00:20:25.145 --> 00:20:26.925
So it doesn't need to be a happy thing,

438
00:20:27.105 --> 00:20:29.485
but that too, diminishment decay.

439
00:20:29.945 --> 00:20:32.645
Um, those two are forms of persistence.

440
00:20:32.665 --> 00:20:36.485
And within those forms of persistence, we do see change

441
00:20:37.105 --> 00:20:40.125
and hope and community, and care growing.

442
00:20:40.125 --> 00:20:43.045
Nevertheless, I'm not sure I understand myself

443
00:20:43.145 --> 00:20:44.605
to be drawing links

444
00:20:44.625 --> 00:20:48.525
or even parallels, between two separate topics

445
00:20:48.705 --> 00:20:52.165
or two disparate fields, meaning queerness on the one hand

446
00:20:52.625 --> 00:20:54.325
and environmental thought on the other.

447
00:20:54.825 --> 00:20:57.885
Um, nor in terms of my own critical practice, do I

448
00:20:58.465 --> 00:21:01.405
see myself using one to read or critique the other?

449
00:21:01.585 --> 00:21:03.805
And that's not to say that these two fields haven't

450
00:21:04.285 --> 00:21:05.685
historically been intention.

451
00:21:05.825 --> 00:21:07.925
The example from McKibbon, for instance, shows

452
00:21:07.925 --> 00:21:11.125
that they often are, that's just typically not where my,

453
00:21:11.385 --> 00:21:14.325
my emphasis is because my interest,

454
00:21:14.465 --> 00:21:18.525
and this emerged organically, is in a set of texts from both

455
00:21:18.545 --> 00:21:20.125
of these historical periods

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00:21:20.125 --> 00:21:24.565
that essentially dwell in blurry regions where I think queer

457
00:21:24.665 --> 00:21:26.405
and environmental relation just simply

458
00:21:26.575 --> 00:21:27.845
can't be thought separately.

459
00:21:28.465 --> 00:21:31.845
Um, and so I think in some ways what I'm doing is altering

460
00:21:32.545 --> 00:21:35.925
the shape of my own critical attention in much the same way

461
00:21:35.925 --> 00:21:39.645
that I'm suggesting moving away from futures could alter the

462
00:21:39.645 --> 00:21:42.725
shape of our activist attention, which is to say,

463
00:21:42.825 --> 00:21:45.605
I'm not engaging in kind of directed acts of

464
00:21:46.205 --> 00:21:48.645
bringing things together or critiquing one

465
00:21:48.645 --> 00:21:50.525
through the other, or reading one

466
00:21:50.525 --> 00:21:51.685
through the lens of the other.

467
00:21:52.185 --> 00:21:55.445
I'm operating in a somewhat, again, we're a scan register,

468
00:21:55.635 --> 00:21:58.725
heating the places where these conversations already overlap

469
00:21:59.185 --> 00:22:01.325
or necessarily have to happen together.

470
00:22:01.585 --> 00:22:04.205
So the brief return to Delaney might be,

471
00:22:04.265 --> 00:22:06.045
times Square red.

472
00:22:06.045 --> 00:22:08.285
Times square blue is an validly queer text,

473
00:22:08.315 --> 00:22:10.965
some somewhat at the center of various strands

474
00:22:10.965 --> 00:22:15.125
of queer studies, but it's also almost impossible to read

475
00:22:15.125 --> 00:22:17.445
and discuss it without noticing the extent

476
00:22:17.445 --> 00:22:19.725
to which it's analysis is ecological,

477
00:22:20.265 --> 00:22:21.725
or at least socioecological.

478
00:22:22.385 --> 00:22:25.765
Um, given its keen attention to systems of,

479
00:22:26.445 --> 00:22:29.245
intertwining relation that constitute urban life

480
00:22:29.265 --> 00:22:32.205
or its interest in what Delaney calls the lymphatic system

481
00:22:32.785 --> 00:22:35.765
of a functional democracy, or just how carefully

482
00:22:35.765 --> 00:22:37.605
and how brilliantly it traces

483
00:22:38.185 --> 00:22:41.445
the way in which local encounters, color and suse

484
00:22:41.505 --> 00:22:45.005
and change and permanently alter the material spaces,

485
00:22:45.145 --> 00:22:47.245
the material environments in which they occur.

486
00:22:47.665 --> 00:22:52.045
Um, and so to adapt, the title of Gabriel Rotella's,

487
00:22:52.365 --> 00:22:56.485
somewhat controversial, strange 1997 book, we could say

488
00:22:56.645 --> 00:23:00.005
that what times Square Red Times Square blue offers us is a

489
00:23:00.005 --> 00:23:01.325
model of sexual ecology.

490
00:23:01.745 --> 00:23:04.045
That's rotella's phrase that that takes seriously

491
00:23:04.105 --> 00:23:07.165
how practices that are nominally at the fringes

492
00:23:07.165 --> 00:23:10.405
of society actually ecologically shape that society.

493
00:23:10.825 --> 00:23:13.325
Um, and so for me, I can't read Delaney,

494
00:23:13.325 --> 00:23:16.925
which is a queer text without understanding it ecologically.

495
00:23:16.925 --> 00:23:19.925
That's not me bringing ecology to it. That's me heeding.

496
00:23:20.065 --> 00:23:22.125
Its kind of internal logics.

497
00:23:22.145 --> 00:23:26.525
And then flip, 1890 example, a very different book,

498
00:23:26.545 --> 00:23:29.685
but also with weird resonances to Delaney,

499
00:23:30.345 --> 00:23:34.565
is Sarah Orange's 1896, collection of sketches,

500
00:23:35.145 --> 00:23:36.605
the country of the Pointed Furs,

501
00:23:36.605 --> 00:23:39.925
which is itself weirdly a cruising tale of a different sort,

502
00:23:40.115 --> 00:23:43.525
insofar as the narrator first encounters this small town in

503
00:23:43.525 --> 00:23:45.725
Maine in the course of a summer cruise,

504
00:23:45.965 --> 00:23:47.365
a literal cruise on a ship.

505
00:23:47.785 --> 00:23:50.165
Um, and this book has captured my attention

506
00:23:50.385 --> 00:23:53.445
for at least 20 years, in part

507
00:23:53.445 --> 00:23:56.565
because of the way in which interpersonal relationships

508
00:23:56.665 --> 00:24:00.845
and intimacies in this book are described almost exclusively

509
00:24:00.865 --> 00:24:02.045
in environmental terms.

510
00:24:02.345 --> 00:24:04.845
So for instance, when the narrator

511
00:24:04.865 --> 00:24:07.245
of the text who's anonymous, I'm calling her the narrator,

512
00:24:07.665 --> 00:24:10.685
first realizes she's growing intimate with

513
00:24:10.705 --> 00:24:15.205
or fond of the landlady in whose house she's staying is when

514
00:24:15.225 --> 00:24:18.965
she comes to realize she knows the scent of herbs,

515
00:24:19.075 --> 00:24:22.485
that are transmitted when her landlady, who's an herbalist,

516
00:24:22.655 --> 00:24:24.045
walks in her own front yard

517
00:24:24.585 --> 00:24:27.085
and she realizes their closeness via this kind

518
00:24:27.085 --> 00:24:28.965
of environmental or ambient scent.

519
00:24:29.465 --> 00:24:31.965
And then relatedly, that landlady's intimacy

520
00:24:31.965 --> 00:24:35.465
with her own mother who lives on a far off island,

521
00:24:35.565 --> 00:24:38.345
is registered not in any kind of direct interactions,

522
00:24:38.925 --> 00:24:41.785
but in things like how she reads the glint

523
00:24:41.785 --> 00:24:45.385
of the sun on on the sea as it passes near the island.

524
00:24:46.005 --> 00:24:47.505
And when I first read this book,

525
00:24:47.525 --> 00:24:50.065
and indeed in some ways even now,

526
00:24:50.425 --> 00:24:53.465
I realized I had no idea how to make sense of it

527
00:24:53.465 --> 00:24:56.505
because none of the ways I knew how to read, including

528
00:24:56.775 --> 00:24:57.985
that it's either queer

529
00:24:58.005 --> 00:25:01.225
or environmental, that I might read it as a queer theorist

530
00:25:01.245 --> 00:25:02.265
or as an eco critic.

531
00:25:02.415 --> 00:25:04.865
None of those ways was sufficient on its own.

532
00:25:05.445 --> 00:25:07.665
And so I think I have always worked,

533
00:25:07.805 --> 00:25:10.105
and I still work in a model of queer ecologies

534
00:25:10.815 --> 00:25:12.705
that really starts from these tangles

535
00:25:13.205 --> 00:25:14.425
and takes them seriously

536
00:25:14.525 --> 00:25:16.305
and then sees what can become of them.

537
00:25:16.925 --> 00:25:19.225
And I guess I would just say I've learned that what becomes

538
00:25:19.245 --> 00:25:21.345
of the tangles, is not the future.

539
00:25:22.055 --> 00:25:23.865
It's some other way of, of going on.

Questioning the Consensus: The Future of Environmental Thought

00:00:00 - I would begin by saying this book essentially emerged from a fairly simple place and then took a, a complex turn, which is that it emerged when I noticed, and then more importantly began to question what is essentially a clear consensus within environmental thought. so although it's quite difficult to state any truth, obviously about an environmental movement that has tremendous range, I think it's safe to say that one thing that unites virtually all of the practices sheltering under that general umbrella of environmentalism is a, a shared

00:00:33 - And so the literary scholars, Cheryl Lasley and Susie O'Brien have made a really interesting observation that while all political movements by definition have to focus on the future, environmentalism long has been unique because it focuses on the future of the future itself, have a kind of red redoubled emphasis on futurity. And this has certainly been true of environmental thoughts since its inception. but in recent years as various crises of our time have deepened, and as critical conversations have attended more

00:01:06 - and between various social and environmental harms, I think this consensus has actually only strengthened that we have to be thinking about the future working toward the future. So the other way to say this, I think even more clearly is that the more imperiled the future seems to become, the more the idea of futures and futurity, come to animate our critical and our activist practice, which also means in an interesting way that the structure of liberatory thought, has come to take on

Future-Focused Activism: Possibilities and Limitations

00:01:38 - meaning it's very concerned with the future of the future itself. So a few examples, and then I'll talk about why it matters. you can think about the frequency with which we see the term futures or future appearing on protest signs such as people holding up signs saying the future is queer or the future is female. we see this in research initiatives, especially in the US focusing on everything from trans futures to digital futures, to environmental futures. And we see this importantly in a huge range of book titles.

00:02:11 - so including Amy Bang's, important book, migrant Futures, Kerik Healings book, queer Time Black Futures, Jerry Canavan's Collection, uneven Futures. and so I think in the face of a future that so often feels imperiled, uncertain, receding, bleak, it seems like we have agreed implicitly that our task as critics and activists is either to save the future as it is on the one hand, or to speculate and imagine

00:02:40 - All of this work, all of these projects are, let me be very clear, incredibly important, critically compelling. I have found them galvanizing both intellectually and politically. but I'm also quite curious about what this kind of, seemingly necessary emphasis on the future has rendered unthinkable, which is to say, what possibilities for care and community and collective action, have been cast into shadow by our sense that we must be thinking about the

Exploring Terminal Conditions and Alternative Futures

00:03:11 - And let me just say briefly by way of closing this answer, part of why I ask such a question and, and question this consensus is that I've long been immersed in and interested in and invested in, scenes from queer life and history where the possibility of reaching the future is off the table. and far from leading simply to resignation or loss or nihilism or mourning, these terminal conditions including terminal illness.

00:03:43 - these conditions often become sites of creative care and world making and collective endeavor. and I think part of what they teach us is show us is the possibility, of persisting, of going on, right? Not by reaching or working toward a future, but by inhabiting wholly different grammars of relation, both to each other and to, the structure of time, the time of the world itself. and this might take us back to the word we used in the question,

00:04:15 - which I think can be understood in two senses. One is just as a compound word, featurelessness as in what do we do when we don't have a future, amidst these various crises, but we can also potentially understand it as two separate words, right? future ness, which is to say, part of what I'm asking, is what we can see or think or do or imagine or be together when the future simply exerts less

Queer Lasting: Embracing the Present Beyond Futures

00:04:46 - so I think that the text and the scenes that I'm engaging in this book, they're neither embracing nor rejecting the future. rather they're simply relatively uninterested in it. even and especially at moments when you might think the need to reach a future should loom large. It's a word, a term lasting who's kind of, complexity and heterogeneity I've just been noticing across a wide range of queer literature and thinking across periods.

00:05:18 - which is that queer lasting is something of, we could think of it as the animating pun, of the book and the queer text that interest me. all of which, and I'll say more about examples later, all of which attend to what it means to live at the end of life, at the end of a family line, at or as the end of a species or even at the end of the future itself. All of those experiences can be summed up in a single phrase

00:05:49 - century American literature. And that I first found in the work of the American regionalist, fiction writer, Sarah or jut, who called this the experience of being at the last. and she was referring most often to the experience of sitting at Deathbeds, but it was certainly a term applicable beyond that. And the more that I sat with this phrase at the last, the more I realized that queer life, which, is a mode of collective existence that historically

Queer Lasting: Embracing Terminality and Persistence

00:06:20 - by non reproductive sexualities, is a way of life that's often spent, at the last, which also means that queer lifelong has involved or required making that condition of being at or near an end being at the last into an affirmative practice, right? A practice of world making and going on, which is to say, I think queerness is in part about the work of lasting in the sense of learning to live in these terminal regions.

00:06:51 - Also of course has a more conventional meaning, which is simply meaning to persist, how things last. And so I think the, the book is defining queer culture, as a mode of existence and a communal way of being in which these two forms of lasting, ending on the one hand and persisting on the other, are not opposed and not antithetical, but are constituently intertwined. And so one question of the book is

00:07:20 - and then these kind of related forms of liberatory thought and practice, which have so often been dominated by the presumption that we need to embrace these logics of futures and think about the future can learn from this ongoing and really trans historical project of queer lasting, which is itself the work of going on, otherwise going on differently. and on a kind of nerdy English teacher note, also just note, and this is a big part of the book,

Exploring the Ephemerality of Futures in Cultural Contexts

00:07:50 - part for your audience. there's also an important difference between future or futures as a static noun, which is something we relate to through these strong transitive directed acts that render the future a direct object. So we save the future, we protect the future. We imagine the future, we reject the future, we might today find ourselves fearing the future. there's a difference between that structure, that grammatical mode of relation

00:08:23 - that is the direct object of our conscious acts, but it's a jar. it's ongoing. It's less locatable, it's more ephemeral, which means it's somewhat harder to pin down and also somewhat harder to notice culturally. And that's part of the point. So lasting, I hope, I think invites us to consider a much broader range of actions and relations and a much broader range of literary texts and cultural scenes as relevant to figuring out

00:08:54 - And collectively and communally when it feels as I think it often does, late in the world. The book is built around two periods that I've deemed periods of queer extinction, and that I think of as unexpected echoes of each other. And I think of them as unexpected echoes, both historically, politically, and for my purpose is more important literarily and kind of what the literary text of that period, entailed, and the ways their forms reflect the kind of crises of their moment.

Queer Histories and Crisis: The 1890s and the AIDS Epidemic

00:09:26 - moment, is actually the American 1890s. and I'm saying American 'cause of my literary examples, but the historical point is beyond the American context. So in the 1890s when the codifying of sexuality, right, meaning the birth of the homosexual as a species to borrow KO's famous phrase, the taxonomizing of sexuality, many scholars have observed, brought to an end or at least rendered invisible and legible modes of queer affiliation

00:09:58 - to those newly taxonomizing categories. You have the kind of extinction of certain forms of relation and possibilities, certain ways of life. And then second to get to your question, the 1980s, kind of long 1980s when the AIDS epidemic in the United States and of course beyond, threatened the total loss of gay life, people felt that and also of specific queer ways of life, mainly the sexual practices by which queer culture and especially gay male gay culture,

00:10:31 - and one, there's many things to say about this. I'll just give two points or examples. when AIDS is discussed retrospectively in terms of the scope of the crisis, it's often described by critics in terms of apocalypse. And this was true at the time too. Susan Sontag famously described it, in terms of apocalypse from now on. But if you go back to the literature, of HIV and aids, many HIV positive writers at the time actually linked the experience of confronting

Exploring Extinction: AIDS Literature and Species Survival

00:11:04 - to the predicament of being an endangered species. so thinking of it in terms of extinction versus apocalypse, and one argument of the chapters I have in the book on AIDS literature is that this body of work, offers and this is kind of remarkable and uncanny, an archive of species extinction written from within. And I'm using species deliberately to go back to that fuco line about the homosexual as a species.

00:11:35 - is something that many environmental thinkers have deemed impossible for a variety of fairly obvious reasons, including we think of extinction, vis-a-vis non-human species who don't write literature. We assume that we can't experience our own death or our own, status as a species, and so species level death would seem impossible. but this really is a kind of archive that I think is getting us there. and then relatedly

00:12:05 - and environmental thinkers who are engaging the topic of extinction tend to understand the role of writing extinction and writing about extinction to be focused on the work of, again, producing futures or propagating or amplifying life via the logic of producing more life through writing in the face of death. These authors that I'm reading, writing in the the heart of the AIDS crisis often find their source of possibility and the sight of ongoingness not in futures

Reimagining Possibility: Kinship between Life, Death, and History

00:12:35 - but in these owly, strangely residual or even backward processes, such as a number of them use linguistic etymology, to rethink how the dead persist in the living. And that can be like the dead Latin root in the English term or other forms. And they often also often look less toward the future, for possibility than consider what it means to look toward the unrealized possibilities of the past.

00:13:06 - what they're doing is recalibrating our sense of where to look for possibility, and openings in the face of various endings, and also fundamentally remaking our understanding of the kinship between the living and the dead. and then just briefly with regard to AIDS on a, a more historical note, I think it's also worth noting that the period when AIDS crescendoed in the us, so again, the 1980s is also interestingly, and by coincidence, largely

00:13:38 - to become more acutely aware of climate change species endangerment and the like. and this is maybe already evident in my point that many AIDS writers were thinking actively about extinction species extinction. And it may also be worth saying as a kind of side note, but it's important to the book. but there's also a, a pretty robust body of aids writing that thinks through the pan, the experience of, living through the epidemic via the language of radioactivity

Intersecting Realities: Queer Life and Environmental Discourse

00:14:08 - after the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. but if these examples suggest that there's a kind of affirmative homology or resonance or even reciprocity between queer life and environmental thought, I think it's also important to acknowledge in that period and beyond, a kind of fundamental fissure between those two discourses. in part because the conditions of life that at least mainstream environmentalism has always,

00:14:40 - but powerfully often are the condition or precondition of queer life and activism. So one kind of clear example to crystallize this, near the end of the end of nature, bill McKibben's 1989 book, that's widely thought to be the first text that introduced, Americans to the idea of global climate change. near the end of that book, he's trying to diagnose what makes Americans reluctant environmental stewards and his, account is

00:15:12 - and that he says, Americans don't readily make friends with the terminally ill. And on the one hand, this comment seems straightforward enough in his context and in the context of an environmental movement that is for clear reasons invested in health and life and futurity and saving the earth. So if we want to save the earth, right, what could be more defeating than an earth that is terminal and cannot be saved? But if we return to that historical context in 1989,

Transformative Care and Queer Activism in Crisis

00:15:46 - and transforming the queer community. And in that period, tens of thousands of Americans, if not more, were precisely making friends with the terminally ill and creating transformative forms of care, and activism in the process. And so part of what's interesting to me is thinking these things together clearly. and I'll just say there's a kind of overdetermined debate in literary studies,

00:16:15 - but I think from those who are questioning the role of the humanities and the overdetermined debate is often, can reading save the world, right? and I would say rather than entering a debate, an overdetermined debate about whether reading can save the world, this book of mine is instead offering queer reading as a ethical practice that's keenly attuned to what remains and becomes possible when things, bodies,

00:16:48 - but continuing is still possible. Change is still possible, and we don't have to reduce that to the possibility of saving the world to make a difference. This is another one of these gestures that's counterintuitive until you start to make it. And then I think it, it makes sense, which is, so I said about aids, the period of extinction that one of that it was both about the threat to life and the threat to specific ways of life.

Fleeting Intimacies: The Significance of Gay Male Cruising During the AIDS Crisis

00:17:18 - during the AIDS crisis, of course, was something like gay male cruising and the forms of fleeting, anonymous promiscuous intimacy that that cultural practice involved, and involves. And on the one hand, such practices of cruising are important precisely because of their temporariness, right? Precisely because of their refusal of monogamy, longevity, state sanctioned relation monumentality and the like. on the other hand, when you sit with some

00:17:47 - and boldly theorized accounts of this cultural practice, especially from, the kind of long DeRay of aids in the us, so one example is Samuel Delaney's book Times Square Red Times Square Blue. you can also really see how these temporary encounters a validly deliberately temporary encounters spread and persist and ramify across the spaces and lives and communities in which they take place, right? It's not that the encounter itself needs to persist

00:18:18 - but these temporary encounters often have indirect effects and yields a mode of, cultural and kind of, civic and environmental persistence and significance that becomes totally illegible and totally unimportant when our focus is on these monumental futures. but it's a mode of persistence that proves absolutely integral to the thriving of communities, that health, to use that word, kind of deliberately self-consciously of urban environments,

Collateral Benefits: Indirect Relations in Queer Thought

00:18:52 - of any one subculture itself. and one thing in particular that Delaney's text helps succeed, I think, is the importance of something like collateral benefit. So we tend to think of collateral as a word involving damage. but collateral, to go back to etymology, means to be together beside, essentially to be beside together. Helene's text really helps us see both in its content and in its form, which is to abutting essays.

00:19:22 - They focus on these modes of indirect relation. is that it helps us see the importance of collateral benefit collateral forms of social relation. And it reminds us, I think, in a really important way for right now, that a great deal of the strength of our social fabric and of the work that we're doing, to strive towards and through alternate worlds, comes not, or at least not simply from focusing on what's in front of us, but also, and especially from taking seriously who

00:19:56 - And so I think one thing to kind of bring it back to the overarching question, one thing that all of the texts I look at, but especially these texts about temporariness, reveal, are these forms of lasting and persistence that run counter to any monumentalize understanding of the future, including we see beings or experiences or communities that can persist in the form of their own diminishment or decay.

Intersections of Queerness and Environmental Thought

00:20:27 - but that too, diminishment decay. those two are forms of persistence. And within those forms of persistence, we do see change and hope and community, and care growing. Nevertheless, I'm not sure I understand myself to be drawing links or even parallels, between two separate topics or two disparate fields, meaning queerness on the one hand and environmental thought on the other. nor in terms of my own critical practice, do I

00:21:01 - And that's not to say that these two fields haven't historically been intention. The example from McKibbon, for instance, shows that they often are, that's just typically not where my, my emphasis is because my interest, and this emerged organically, is in a set of texts from both of these historical periods that essentially dwell in blurry regions where I think queer and environmental relation just simply can't be thought separately.

00:21:32 - the shape of my own critical attention in much the same way that I'm suggesting moving away from futures could alter the shape of our activist attention, which is to say, I'm not engaging in kind of directed acts of bringing things together or critiquing one through the other, or reading one through the lens of the other. I'm operating in a somewhat, again, we're a scan register, heating the places where these conversations already overlap

Queer Texts and Ecological Intersections

00:22:01 - So the brief return to Delaney might be, times Square red. Times square blue is an validly queer text, some somewhat at the center of various strands of queer studies, but it's also almost impossible to read and discuss it without noticing the extent to which it's analysis is ecological, or at least socioecological. given its keen attention to systems of, intertwining relation that constitute urban life

00:22:32 - of a functional democracy, or just how carefully and how brilliantly it traces the way in which local encounters, color and suse and change and permanently alter the material spaces, the material environments in which they occur. and so to adapt, the title of Gabriel Rotella's, somewhat controversial, strange 1997 book, we could say that what times Square Red Times Square blue offers us is a

00:23:01 - That's rotella's phrase that that takes seriously how practices that are nominally at the fringes of society actually ecologically shape that society. and so for me, I can't read Delaney, which is a queer text without understanding it ecologically. That's not me bringing ecology to it. That's me heeding. Its kind of internal logics. And then flip, 1890 example, a very different book, but also with weird resonances to Delaney,

Intertwining Intimacies: Queer Connections in Nature

00:23:35 - the country of the Pointed Furs, which is itself weirdly a cruising tale of a different sort, insofar as the narrator first encounters this small town in Maine in the course of a summer cruise, a literal cruise on a ship. and this book has captured my attention for at least 20 years, in part because of the way in which interpersonal relationships and intimacies in this book are described almost exclusively

00:24:02 - So for instance, when the narrator of the text who's anonymous, I'm calling her the narrator, first realizes she's growing intimate with or fond of the landlady in whose house she's staying is when she comes to realize she knows the scent of herbs, that are transmitted when her landlady, who's an herbalist, walks in her own front yard and she realizes their closeness via this kind of environmental or ambient scent. And then relatedly, that landlady's intimacy

00:24:35 - is registered not in any kind of direct interactions, but in things like how she reads the glint of the sun on on the sea as it passes near the island. And when I first read this book, and indeed in some ways even now, I realized I had no idea how to make sense of it because none of the ways I knew how to read, including that it's either queer or environmental, that I might read it as a queer theorist or as an eco critic.

Beyond Futures: Embracing Queer Ecologies

00:25:22 - And so I think I have always worked, and I still work in a model of queer ecologies that really starts from these tangles and takes them seriously and then sees what can become of them. And I guess I would just say I've learned that what becomes of the tangles, is not the future. It's some other way of, of going on.

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