This is the eleventh 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.

Introduction

It might seem like the wrong time to push back against queer joy. At a moment defined by geopolitical conflict, war, genocide, supply chain disruptions, inflationary spikes, cost-of-living crises, and climate backtracking amid ecological breakdown—not to mention a “significant backlash against [the] rise in queer studies, theory, and general visibility”¹—God forbid people (queer or otherwise) get to have a bit of joy!

My suspicion of the idea of queer joy does not result from a denial of the important role of positive affect in kinship, community-building, or political organizing. Nor do I dispute the possibility for “romance at a pipeline protest” or “intimacy at doomsday.”² Moreover, I wholly endorse the need for articulating positive visions—of alternative worlds, utopias, relations, infrastructures, and modes of production—perhaps especially for people who have been socially marginalized or who have had their histories reduced to traumas.

“If we consider sex not as a nexus of joyous connection but rather as an internal division within nature that inaugurates cultural and economic practices, then how might that re-orient (or dis-orient) an understanding of queerness, normativity, and the form of politics adequate to the current climate-class conjuncture?”

But in affirming the negativity of sex and enjoyment, I wish to draw insights from psychoanalysis and the antisocial thesis in queer theory to offer reflections on the present climate-class conjuncture. Specifically, I want to consider the necessary socio-technical and affective infrastructures that must be built with a view to both the urgency of decarbonization and the “long-haul” organizing required to withstand the rise of fascism and ecological degradation. If we consider sex not as a nexus of joyous connection but rather as an internal division within nature that inaugurates cultural and economic practices, then how might that re-orient (or dis-orient) an understanding of queerness, normativity, and the form of politics adequate to the current climate-class conjuncture? Joy cannot be understood as an unambiguously positive affect, I argue, unless we subtract its properly sexual dimension. And if “queer” is to have any association with “sex,” as most would agree it must, then I think the inherent negativity of the latter must determine to some degree the affects available to the former.

Sex and Negativity

In everyday speech, “sex” signifies a bundle of interrelated concepts and practices such as sexual intercourse and activity, biological sex (e.g., female, male, intersex, etc.), and sexuality (as a constellation of identities, desires, behaviours, etc.). If you ask someone how they relate to sex, you are in some sense asking them about all of the above, and beyond. By thinking about sex in this broader way, I am drawing especially on a Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment of sex as a negative ontological category. From this perspective, sex names a kind of impasse between nature and culture, or a “stumbling block of sense.”³ Sex cannot be reduced to a contradiction between pre-existing and wholly distinct entities (such as nature versus culture), but rather as a contradiction it is “involved in the very structuring of these entities, in their very being.”⁴

Think of this in relation to what was historically termed the nature-nurture problem: the inherent challenge of disentangling the variously genetic, environmental, and socio-cultural processes that cause human behaviours. While this might be thought of as an epistemological problem (a problem of knowing the true cause) or an empirical one (inadequate data or scientific observation), psychoanalysis makes this problem ontological: sex is the non-relation between “nature” and “culture.” In other words, sex names not simply some gap in knowledge but rather something real, something that exists, but the existence of which can only register as absence. As Joan Copjec puts it, “sex as cause cannot be located in any positive phenomenon…, but is manifest in negative phenomena exclusively: lapses, interruptions that index a discontinuity or jamming of the causal chain.”⁵ Sex is symptomatic of the constitutive incompleteness of reality, the impossibility of restoring a full sense of cultural meaning to capital-N Nature.

“Sex is symptomatic of the constitutive incompleteness of reality, the impossibility of restoring a full sense of cultural meaning to capital-N Nature.”

This understanding of sex has implications for both queer theory and environmental politics. Sex offers no firm terrain upon which stable sexual, social, or political identities can be grounded, nor does any given sexual orientation necessarily generate a radical, emancipatory politics, even if it is socially subversive or non-normative. This point was well made by Leo Bersani in his 1987 essay “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, in which he critiques the “murderous representations” of male homosexuality amid the HIV/AIDS crisis. Bersani directed his scrutiny at two sources: the conservative disgust at gay sex, which was used to justify letting people die, as well as at the gay men who sought to “rediscover their lost bathhouses as laboratories of ethical liberalism, places where… ideals of community and diversity are authentically put into practice.”⁶

Refusing both weaponized disgust and romanticized celebrations of gay sex, Bersani articulated an early version of what has come to be known as the “anti-social thesis” on sex within queer theory. He argued that “sexuality is socially dysfunctional in that it brings people together only to plunge them into a self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance that drives them apart.”⁷ Lacan used jouissance to underscore the ambivalence of enjoyment—the simultaneity of pleasure-in-pain and pain-in-pleasure. In this view, there is an excessive dimension of enjoyment that disrupts the systems of meaning that make it possible. Jouissance expresses Freud’s notion of the death drive, a self-destructive and self-annihilating force that operates on the terrain of unconscious sexuality.

How does this relate to “queer joy”? JJ Wright, Joshua Falek, and Ellis Greenberg define queer joy as “a defiant celebration and a contagiously positive force that has the potential to bring powerful and unpredictable effects that can challenge norms, positively impact the self, and connect communities.”⁸ I am left wondering, however, where the sexual dimension of queerness figures into concepts of queer joy. The reference here to both contagion and unpredictable power already gesture toward the ambivalence of (sexual, queer) joy as a social force. Recalling Bersani’s critique of “lost bathhouses,” however, we must avoid the assumption that queer joy has a built-in redemption arc or a telos unshakably oriented toward “positive impacts” or “connecting communities.”

Crucially, within the Lacanian tradition, sex is a negative category, but it is not only that. While it is fundamentally the name for a primordial division that cuts across nature-society, it is also this very division that conditions the possibility for actually-existing social relations, discourses, forms of kinship, and the material practices that undergird them. In other words, sex is a generative contradiction, a gap internal to nature that inaugurates specific economic and cultural practices. Lacan famously stated that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship,” but his point here is not that humans do not create social bonds nor that sexuality is irrelevant to social bonds.⁹ Rather, he says sex does not involve a relation of complementarity—for example, some fantasy of harmonious balance between the two opposing forces of male and female. Moreover, he argues that the lack of any such constitutive harmony makes specific practices, such as courtly love, necessary to establish social bonds. Political ecologists who draw on Lacanian theory have extended this logic to a critique of nature and environmental politics; they argue that there is no harmonious relationship between human communities and their ecological context.¹⁰ This lack of harmonious human-nature relationality necessitates concrete practices, labour processes, and infrastructures, the sum total of which might be understood as the social metabolism.

Infrastructures of Transition

Social and socio-technical infrastructures emerge from an internal division within nature, which we might call sex. In addition to this ontological view of sex, there is a historical specificity that must be accounted for, the threads of our current “climate-class conjuncture.”¹¹ This phrase underscores how historically specific forms of ownership and control over lands, resources, infrastructures, and technologies are co-constitutive of environments at both local and global-climatic scales, affecting the overall labour process or social metabolism between human activity and the ecological context within which it is embedded. To speak of a predominant fossil fuel-dependent economic system or a “fossil capitalism” is to emphasize the deep connection between how capitalism emerged in history and how it is sustained through the constant addition of energy inputs from fossil fuels.¹² The transition to a fossil-fuel-powered economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries coincided with the generalization of capitalist social relations.¹³

“The present conjuncture is dominated by a powerful nexus of fossil, finance, and tech capitalist interests hellbent on the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructures paired with speculative, unproven, and market-driven techno-optimist solutions.”

The present conjuncture is dominated by a powerful nexus of fossil, finance, and tech capitalist interests hellbent on the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructures paired with speculative, unproven, and market-driven techno-optimist solutions. In Canada, this looks like massive investments in liquified natural gas (LNG) pipelines and processing facilities, paired with never-ending calls to expand diluted bitumen pipeline capacity to increase tar sands production, greenwashed via appeals to a planned “large-scale carbon capture, storage, and emissions reduction initiative.”¹⁴ In short, we get climate solutions built upon pipelines that carry “decarbonized” fossil fuels—a tired, uninspiring fantasy. Just add a bunch of AI data centres!

Amidst this bleak scenario, it is easy to remain stuck in the capitalist realism of the climate crisis. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” as the slogan goes. This sense is perhaps heightened by recent work in energy history. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues that no energy transition is occurring nor has any such transition ever occurred; he emphasizes that addition rather than replacement characterizes changes in primary energy sources historically.¹⁵ Meanwhile, responding to geopolitical chaos and the foundational myth of the “rules-based order,” Mark Carney asserts that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”¹⁶ The transition that is genuinely needed, where large-scale decarbonization is achieved in as socially and environmentally just a way as possible, would in fact require rupture, but not the kind that Carney is practicing: that is, gutting environmental protections and rolling out a flood of omnibus legislation and major projects justified via faux economic nationalism.¹⁷

Rather, this genuinely needed transition would require large-scale investment in different kinds of infrastructures, an expansion of public services and ownership, the creation of high-quality, secure, unionized jobs, and respect for the jurisdiction and consent of Indigenous peoples.¹⁸ The Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce, for example, argues that care work must be understood as a form of critical social infrastructure that requires major investments: “Infrastructure investments are typically understood as long-term assets that produce future economic and social benefits…. Care systems function in the same way. Investments in childcare, home care, long-term care, mental health services, disability supports, and caregiving income supports produce measurable long-term economic returns.”¹⁹ To redefine what counts as “critical infrastructure” in the present ideological struggle also means building power across working-class, labour, social, environmental, and Indigenous movements in Canada.

Critical Affective Infrastructures

Infrastructure development is central to decarbonization, but to bring about an energy transition that is radically just will require the mobilization of political affects, social infrastructures of care, and technical and environmental knowledges. Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen say that infrastructure is not inherently colonial: a pipe can carry fresh water or toxic sludge.²⁰ Because infrastructural development involves a massive investment of resources that lock in trajectories of economic development and environmental change, infrastructure investment is a significant social choice that warrants democratic deliberation. But as AbdouMaliq Simone writes, too often the story is “what could have been. Infrastructure always seems to promise something, and so often it seems as if it is a promise intended to be broken.”²¹ These “broken promises” represent the frustrated possibilities of infrastructures, which, I argue, endow them with an inherently affective form of politics. Kai Bosworth outlines the dialectical nature of what he calls “affective infrastructure”: physical infrastructures generate specific affects but affects also undergird the political movements that build power to secure certain kinds of infrastructure development.²²

“There is a need for new affective infrastructures—that is, durable political institutions and relations of care—that could be adequate to winning the kinds of physical and social infrastructures required for collective survival.”

There is a need for new affective infrastructures—that is, durable political institutions and relations of care—that could be adequate to winning the kinds of physical and social infrastructures required for collective survival. One does not need to resort to nostalgia for the glory days of twentieth-century mass politics, characterized by strong working-class parties and unions, to see that long-term and institutionally secure forms of political organization are needed.²³ In other words, “infrastructure” must be approached simultaneously on the terrain of physical building, political organizing, and care work. How do queer people and queer joy fit into this picture, given the treatment of sex outlined in the earlier section? Queer people are often forced to confront the contingencies of kinship, of not always being able to take for granted the love, support, and acceptance of so-called “blood relatives.” Many queer people must forge their own kinship relations from an early age without any guarantee secured by traditions or norms. This is an incredibly challenging and fraught process, and there is no universal pathway that applies to all queer people, given the internal diversity of that social category.

My wager, however, is that one of the defining features of queerness is a basic open-mindedness, a willingness to experiment with alternative forms of social organization, and a fraught (though fruitful) confrontation with the ambiguous relationship between objective material interests and subjective desires. This does not necessarily entail a non-normative or anti-normative project for queerness as such; queer people might have a unique role to play in building new, better forms of normativity. Rather, it means that wherever new forms of co-existence and living well are being attempted on the testing grounds of history, queer people will be there attempting to forge new bonds and build, along with the broader working class, the power necessary to secure the critical infrastructures of long-term collective survival.

Feature Image: Infrastructure. Bob Howe. Flickr.

Notes

1. Jessica DeWitt, Tina Adcock, and Sarah York-Bertram, “Call for Submissions – Succession IV: Queering the Environment – ‘Queer Joy,’” The Otter~La loutre (blog), Network in Canadian History and Environment, February 28, 2026, https://niche-canada.org/2026/02/28/call-for-submissions-succession-iv-queering-the-environment-queer-joy/. ↩︎
2. Joshua Whitehead, ed., Love after the End: An Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021), 10; Casey Burkholder, JJ Wright, and Melissa Keehn, “Queer Joy as Pedagogy,” Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 127, nos. 9–10 (2025): 101–34, https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681251401633. ↩︎
3. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Verso, 1994), 204.   ↩︎
4. Alenka Zupančič, What is Sex? (MIT Press, 2017), 3. ↩︎
5. Joan Copjec, “The Sexual Compact,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 17, no. 2 (2012): 32. ↩︎
6. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 222, https://doi.org/10.2307/3397574. ↩︎
7. Bersani, 222.   ↩︎
8. JJ Wright, Joshua Falek, and Ellis Greenberg, “Queer Joy-Centered Sexuality Education: Offering a Novel Framework for Gender-Based Violence Prevention,” International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies 22, no. 4 (2025): 603, https://doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2024.2372296. ↩︎
9. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (W. W. Norton, 1998), 58. ↩︎
10. Pieter De Vries and Ilan Kapoor, “Psychoanalytic Political Ecology,” Political Geography 118 (April 2025): 103297, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103297. ↩︎
11. Jason W. Moore, “Nature and Other Dangerous Words: Marx, Method and the Proletarian Standpoint in the Web of Life,” Dialectical Anthropology 49, no. 2 (2025): 164, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-025-09775-x. ↩︎
12. Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming (Verso, 2016). ↩︎
13. Matthew T. Huber, “Energizing Historical Materialism: Fossil Fuels, Space and the Capitalist Mode of Production,” Geoforum 40, no. 1 (2009): 105–15, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2008.08.004. ↩︎
14. Prime Minister of Canada, “Implementation Agreement for the Canada-Alberta Memorandum of Understanding of November 27, 2025,” May 15, 2026, https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/backgrounders/2026/05/15/implementation-agreement-canada-alberta-memorandum-understanding. ↩︎
15. Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy (Harper, 2025). ↩︎
16. Prime Minister of Canada, “‘Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path’ Prime Minister Carney Addresses the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting,” January 20, 2026, https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/speeches/2026/01/20/principled-and-pragmatic-canadas-path-prime-minister-carney-addresses. ↩︎
17. Shiri Pasternak and Dayna Nadine Scott, “Canada Said It Would Stand up to Trump. Instead, It’s Taking Cues from Him,” The Guardian, June 18, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/18/canada-trump-flood-zone. ↩︎
18. Angele Alook, Emily Eaton, David Gray-Donald, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman, and Bronwen Tucker, The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-Called Canada (Between the Lines, 2023). ↩︎
19. Canadian Women’s Chamber of Commerce, “Canada’s Missing Major Project: The Canadian National Care Economy Strategy,” May 2026, p. 7, https://canwcc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MPO-Proposal-Canadian-National-Care-Economy-Strategy-Canadian-Womens-Chamber-of-Commerce_R.pdf. ↩︎
20. Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen, “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119, no. 2 (2020): 245, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-8177747. ↩︎
21. AbdouMaliq Simone, “Afterword: Come on out, You’re Surrounded: The Betweens of Infrastructure,” City 19, nos. 2–3 (2015): 378, https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2015.1018070. ↩︎
22. Kai Bosworth, “What Is ‘Affective Infrastructure’?” Dialogues in Human Geography 13, no. 1 (2023): 54–72, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206221107025. ↩︎
23. Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics (Verso, 2026). ↩︎

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Isaac Thornley

Isaac Thornley is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Human Geography and the Institute for Environment, Conservation, and Sustainability at University of Toronto Scarborough. He researches environmental conflicts tied to resource and infrastructure development in Canada, such as pipelines, mining roads, and data centres. His work combines political ecology and social theory (especially, psychoanalytic Marxism) to analyze the political, economic, and ideological terrain of climate change and energy transitions. He works collaboratively on multiple research projects, including 8th Fire Rising, Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism, and Trade Unions and Labour Environmentalism (TULE). He has been active in multiple unions (CUPE 3902 and CUPE 3903), advocating for improvements to wages, working conditions, and job security. As a gay / bisexual / queer / LGBTQ+ person / Lacanian subject, he is ambivalent about the role of sex and joy in emancipatory environmental politics.

Latest posts by Isaac Thornley (see all)

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