Queer Lasting

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 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, which threatened the total loss of gay lives and specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its many-shaded intimacy with death, offers us a rich archive to produce new ways of thinking through our environmental cataclysm. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the paradigms that environmentalism avoids, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.