This is the second post in the Succession IV: Queering the Environment – “Queer Joy” series. This series, edited by Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, invites contributors to build off of scholarship and lived knowledge that envisions queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

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The Great Prick Story, or
more unimaginatively, the Anthropocene
is a story by Skygods, of Earth-beings and the Earthbound
of Gaia
in trouble, troubled times, troubling times
matters awry
out of Skygods’ hands (if only they had fingery eyes!), molded into malformed forms
forming haunted landscapes, populated with futureless bad death ghosts
(ghosts demand a future)
haunting specters of thoughtlessness, birthed from the extinction of curiosity
(the 7th Great Extinction)
a rejection of SF
[speculative fabulation,
          science fiction,
                    science fact,
                             string figures,
                                     speculative feminism,
                                            soin de ficelle,
                                                    so far …]
of patterning agential possibilities,
of intra-active worlding-words, and times
of matters that matter
(like mushrooms, like poetry)
to think-with
to stay with
the naturalcultural
the multispecies trouble (so much trouble)
in favour of apocalyptic narratives,
setting the stage for saviour narratives,
alienating narratives, that is
narratives that eviscerate living-space entanglements
making space for the violent ordinary
forging delusions of mastery, (unthink mastery we must!)
prioritizing asymmetry, always hierarchizing
denying inter-dependency, abhorring co-regulation
valorizing the Self, fictions of absolute independency
living life on points,
in spheres, delimiting boundaries
working with binaries: inside, outside
                          safe, unsafe
                          culture, nature
                          subject, object
                          I, Other

forgetting the ever present viscous porosity
the seepages (we are leaky bodies)
the truth of our ecological-cellves, ourcellves
only remembering it in narratives of toxicity
of threat, threatening Others worthy of elimination
our transhistoric psychic anxiety of contamination going strong,
unresolved
purity culture narratives
remainders of mastery (unthink mastery we must!)
delusions of invulnerability, fears of contaminate-ability
dreams of superiority, transcendentality (Skygods!)
charting teleological pathways, straightways,
progress progressing one way, the right way (says who?), only
forgetting
flight ways, life way,
Life

No, this will not do
The Great Prick Story will not do
the Earth-beings and the Earthbound need another story,
thankfully they already have another,
their own, a story with not by,
a story with:　

God as change, Change as god
nonsovereign relationality
belongings and longings
fractal historicities
indigeneities, life wor(l)ds
networked reenactments
tentacularity
composting passion & compassion:
                                   ordinary
                              human compassion,
                                   compassion
                              of curiosity,
                                   compassion
                              of recognition,
                                   compassion
                              of truth,
                                   compassion
                              of possibility, and
                                   grief
we so desperately need to grieve,
oscillating between anger and denial stops us from
completing the cycle of grief, from
attending to the pain of our pain, loneliness
moving towards acceptance, and
re-turning towards the present future
(remember: ghosts [Berlant{present} and Muñoz{future}] too have desires)

desiring a story with a wee bit of hope,
Of collaborative friction, collaborative survival
Of the partial connections, sites of equivocation
Of animated humanness, transcorporeality
Of the circulation of intimacy, the extra-ordinary
Of the exteriority (of the hope) within, not the constitutive outside

And so I pray:
        May your day be light
by the beauty of your soul
        and dim when needed,
adjusting to meet the day.
        The demands. The demands. Always the demands.
Calling you forth.
        Exhausting.
Your breath a long streak across the sky.
        A long puff. A sigh.
The leaves are leaving and how you wish you could too.
        Let the wind carry you.
But.
        You are rooted.
You'll stand bare, until spring.
        Until the leaves come again.
Until the sap runs once again.
        It will come.
Spring will come.
        So come look,
        look at the bark you grew.
Just how beautifully you bloomed.

because it is the story of The Hope Within that we need
active hope, weedy hope
clingy hope, exhausted hope,
possible hope, shattered hope
hope beyond hope,
to rewild, to animate,
to live
and
           die, a good death

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As I waded into the terrain of queer ecology, as the oceans boil and so does my blood without the imaginary comfort of a metaphor, I tried to distill, evaporated as I am, the the ocean of words in which I have been swimming (Barad 2003; Berlant 1998, 2011, 2016; Butler 2019; Meekosha and Shuttleworth 2009; Shildrick 2009; Alaimo 2010; Chen 2012; Tsing 2015, 2017; Singh 2018; Haraway 2017). 

Once again, queer lives and queer scholarship are under renewed assault with malicious campaigns and funding cuts. What to do in such moments of deep sadness and melancholia? Of rage and helplessness? When the horizon itself looks to be receding?

It was joy that came to me. Not an easy joy, not a naive one, but joy as Muñoz (2019) might have recognized it as anticipatory, insisting on what has not yet arrived. Joy as an orientation toward resisting the normativity of homonationalism (Puar 2017) and heteropartiarchy that continues to erase us.

However, even though Hope came to me I was—and still am to a certain degree—hesitant to welcome Hope. It’s easier to think about the anthropocene as an monstrous inevitability, rather than to wonder, why is the story of the anthropocene an act of soul murder? A story that hinders our survival and flourishment? But, we all have the internal capacity to heal. Our bodies remember. They say no (Mate 2003, 2021), urging us to embrace a feminist politics of vulnerability (Górska 2016), and see how Hope never went anywhere (Le Guin 1990). 

To welcome Hope, then, I have written a poem with the help of the lifeworlds I came across, crossed, and was crossed by. 

Feature Image: Embers. Photo by Muhammad Khurram (Kuu).

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Bibliography

Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. “Bodily Natures.” In Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, 1–26. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801–31. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321.

Berlant, Lauren. 1998. “Intimacy: A Special Issue.” Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 281–88.

Berlant, Lauren. 2016. “The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 34 (3): 393–419. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775816645989.

Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. A John Hope Franklin Center Book. Durham London: Duke University Press.

Butler, Octavia E. 2019. Parable of the Sower. Paperback reissue. New York Boston: Grand Central Publishing.

Chen, Mel Y. 2012. “Following Mercurial Affect.” In Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect, 196–221. Durham London: Duke University Press.

Górska, Magdalena. 2016. Breathing Matters: Feminist Intersectional Politics of Vulnerability. Linköping: LiU-Tryck.

Haraway, Donna. 2017. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. San Francisco Art Institute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYA7sMQaBQ&list=PLy4XDHvPUVyH-mqKs_VPvejGaTF3pEwa2&index=5.

Le Guin, Ursula K. 1990. The Earthsea Trilogy. Reprint. A Penguin Book Fiction. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Mate, Gabor. 2003. When the Body Says No: Understanding the Stress-Disease Connection. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/52154067.html.

Meekosha, Helen, and Russell Shuttleworth. 2009. “What’s so ‘Critical’ about Critical Disability Studies?” Australian Journal of Human Rights 15 (1): 47–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/1323238X.2009.11910861.

Mindfulness Exercises. 2021. The Five Levels of Compassion – Dr  Gabor Maté. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzrqbrWLBaM.

Muñoz, José Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. 10th Anniversary edition. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press.

Puar, Jasbir K. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371755.

Shildrick, Margrit. 2009. “Genealogies.” In Dangerous, Discourses of Disability, Subjectivity and Sexuality. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Singh, Julietta. 2018. “Decolonizing Mastery.” In Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements, 29–64. Duke University Press.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.