This is the twelfth and concluding 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.

Lately, I have been working on a queer historical case study that, at first glance, seems—and is—more tragic than joyful. It features Beverley Holmwood, a nurse who likely suffered a needlestick injury whilst working in the Royal Jubilee Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia. Two months later, on December 9, 1991, she passed away from an acute form of hepatitis. This case study also features Shirley Petten, Holmwood’s partner of twenty years. She mourned, remembered, and commemorated Holmwood for twenty-three years more, until her own passing in 2014.

Amidst the grief that suffuses Petten’s archives of this event, I’ve been surprised by joy, again and again. One source of joy was this queer couple’s relationship with the more-than-human world. Both women were transplants from Toronto who, like many Canadians, longed to live on the West Coast. In 1987, they took the plunge, scarcely dreaming that they would have only a few short years to enjoy Vancouver Island together. In 2002, eleven years after Holmwood’s death, Petten finally fulfilled their shared wish to live near the water. “I love doing the things that we would have done together,” she wrote, “walking by the ocean; admiring ‘our’ mountains; watching the birds, ducks, herons, otters, seals, boats, planes, and so much more. Every time I do these things, I think about you and I can feel your presence.”¹

Up until her move to the shoreline, Petten had also felt her partner’s presence linger on at their shared home in Saanichton. Holmwood, an avid gardener, had planted luxuriant beds and bushes of flowers in their yard. They continued to bloom, attracting myriad birds and reminding Petten daily of her much-missed love. The wind chimes Holmwood had hung on the back porch continued to ring in the breeze—and, sometimes, when no breeze blew. For Petten, their movement in the absence of wind signified Holmwood’s continued existence and commitment to their ongoing relationship from beyond the mortal plane.² They were a source of queer joy embedded in a more-than-human world (which, in this case, we should understand as including what my colleague Luke Clossey has termed the Unbelieved, or supernatural beings).³

Queer joy is a relatively new subject of study among scholars, one that has received little attention within the environmental humanities and social sciences. Below, I identify five themes that cut across this series. These may suggest future directions for research among those interested in queer joy as a way of knowing and being in relation with the environment and more-than-human beings.

1.  Queer joy can be, but is not necessarily a means of resisting heteronormativity and other social systems of oppression in the past, present, and future.

Kuu Khurram understands “joy as an orientation toward resisting the normativity of homonationalism … and heteropatriarchy.” Isaac Thornley goes even further, arguing that “queer people might have a unique role to play in building new, better forms of normativity.” Queer joy can take the form of rays of light shining through the cracks in the-world-that-is from a world beyond that is not yet with us, and which queer people can try to realize through imagination and action. In his relationship with Gos the goshawk, T.H. White derived a kind of fulfillment that early twentieth-century English society associated with heterosexual love, marriage, and reproduction—things that he did not want, as a gay man. Sex worker joy, in Georgina Gifford’s formulation, celebrates rather than sacrifices sexual and erotic pleasure. It gestures toward a future in which work is queered, in which it is not constrained by the structures of Protestant-inflected capitalism.

Yet queer joy can also recapitulate structures of oppression. Alongside White’s love for Gos, Ishaan Selby notes, lay his wish to control the hawk. In hindsight, Erin O’Brien realizes that her childhood dance with a willow was not a consensual one, despite the tree’s implied invitation. Queer joy can enact anthropocentrism; it can come at the expense of non-human beings. When sought by queer people with social privilege, queer joy can also come at the expense of marginalized peoples. Kaden Jelsing illustrates how Nettle Fest, in reifying nettle–settler relations, enacted a settler colonial erasure of longer, arguably richer histories of interaction between Coast Salish peoples and this plant. “We may claim [nettles] as kin,” Jelsing writes, “but would they claim us, that is, the predominantly non-Native settlers among us?”

2.  Queer joy can be a means of building relationships, communities, and worlds among people, and between people and non-human beings.

Whether or not the nettles would have claimed these queer settlers, the latter took pleasure in claiming and queering nettles. They identified deeply with “a plant often seen by dominant society as weedy, worthless, perverse, or irritating,” incorporating it into Olympia’s queer punk community through acts of consumption, kink, and artistic performance and representation. Likewise, White sought and found love and connection as well as joy in his relationship with Gos. We cannot know whether these nettles or this hawk experienced such relationships as consensual.

“For Ourkiya, joy stems from queer people coming together in places not subject to heteronormative surveillance and living out their queerness in unscripted, spontaneous, exploratory ways.”

In Asmae Ourkiya’s post, joy is a fundamental component of queer community-building. Their analysis examines what they term queer habitats, or spaces “designed entirely to center, protect, and sustain us.” For them, joy stems from queer people coming together in places not subject to heteronormative surveillance and living out their queerness in unscripted, spontaneous, exploratory ways. The joy produced in this atmosphere of freedom and experimentation acts as a “protective infrastructure” and ensures the continuance of queer community amidst a heteronormative society.

Queer joy can even remake worlds, as Juliano Bentes argues in his exploration of Carimônias. He acknowledges that this claim may be outsized. Yet, to him, this collaborative practice of music-making by Themônais has transformed and continues to transform society at large in Belém. “It alters the grammar of what can be recognized as carimbó, as tradition, as peoplehood, as Amazonia, as legitimate presence,” he holds.

3.  Queer joy can arise from experiences in specific rural and urban environments and feelings of belonging to, or in, these places.

In E.M. Forster’s posthumously published novel Maurice (1971), the early twentieth-century English countryside is figured as “a tranquil and restorative site of queer sanctuary and agency.” Specifically, the greenwood, a semi-mythical space modelled on Sherwood Forest, is the novel’s epicentre of queer joy, according to Chetana Gavini. Closer to the present, Nettle Fest provided an all-too-rare means for queer punks to encounter and engage with rural environments around Olympia. In the late twentieth century, as Jelsing reminds us, cities were where queer people usually congregated and built communities.

Urban environments serve as crucibles of queer joy, too, in some of this series’ posts. For Bentes, Belém, and the urban Amazon more broadly, “is not an exotic setting for an imported queer lens, but a hot, humid, unequal, festive, Catholic, improvised, violent, and inventive ground …, a place that forces thought to change shape if it wants to account for what it sees.” In other words, and in the finest tradition of environmental history, this urban environment actively helps to construct human affairs therein. 

Mars Plater platforms two queer urban places in New York City: Christopher Park, and Jacob Riis Park. Each had its own queer character. Christopher Park was particularly welcoming to queer youth and gender non-conforming people; after the Stonewall uprising, its “leafy greenness” served as an “oasis of pleasure and comfort” for queer activists to rest before continuing their fight. Jacob Riis Park is an “unruly” environment, an ever-shifting barrier island on the threshold between land and water. It has been a site of queer play, experimentation, and self-discovery for eighty-five years. It has taught generations of queer people that “we can be whoever we want to be and make our bodies our own.” If we apply Ourkiya’s analytical lens to Plater’s case study, we can see that these queer habitats, too, are threatened by the specific kind of environmental degradation of which Ourkiya warns. Plater chronicles how the National Park Service, which stewards these sites under the aegis of a heteronormative and anti-trans government, is harassing queer people at and excluding them from these historically queer spaces.

4.  Queer joy can be visceral and material, sometimes as a result of queer people’s love for and connection to the Earth.

The embodied nature of queer joy comes to the fore in several of this series’ posts. For Bentes, queer joy is neither “a slogan,” nor “an optimistic wrapper around resistance,” nor “a colourful photograph taken after pain in order to prove that life goes on.” It is, rather, “a denser joy, sweatier, more committed to the material of life, a joy made of collective presence, humor, erotic charge, noise, summons, bodies that take risks and bodies that support one another.” Sweat features, too, in Plater’s somatically rich retelling of the night that the Stonewall uprising began. Under a full moon and a stifling blanket of heat and humidity, “skins sweaty from joyful dancing cut short” by yet another police raid of the Stonewall Inn, queer New Yorkers made what would become a historic decision: no more. This stops tonight.

The series’ opening piece by Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle as well as that by O’Brien each understand queer joy as arising from people’s intimate encounters with the Earth. Ecosexuals such as Stephens and Sprinkle “shamelessly hug trees, massage the earth with [their] feet, and talk erotically to plants.” They “caress rocks [and] are pleasured by waterfalls.” O’Brien, similarly, recalls “eating dirt, pressing clay through [her] fingers, swinging from a willow tree.” In her experience, queer joy emerges from a more-than-human world “through curiosity, sensory wonder, and the radical ordinariness of noticing.”

There is, I think, a tension running through this series between analyses which engage with the materiality of environments and more-than-human beings, and those which depict “environments” in more metaphorical terms. Perhaps we should conceive of this as a spectrum, with materiality at one end and metaphor at the other, in acknowledgment of the pieces that employ both approaches. Ourkiya’s queer habitats and microclimates, for example, are both signified and embodied. Ourkiya understands joy as only emerging communally in these environments once each queer person’s immune and parasympathetic nervous systems have been activated, and they feel safe.

5.  Queer joy can be entwined with feelings of hope and anticipation.

Bentes conceptualizes queer joy as something “that does not come after struggle as a prize, but in the middle of it, as a condition for continuing.” Hope and anticipation can act as drivers, too. By countering the feelings of hopelessness and helplessness that often accompany ecological destruction or social disapprobation, they clear space for queer joy to grow. Although Khurram is tempted to conclude that there is no hope in the face of contemporary ecocide, his poem ultimately recognizes the need for a narrative that he calls “The Hope Within.” It is a story of “active hope, weedy hope / clingy hope, exhausted hope, / possible hope, shattered hope / hope beyond hope.” It spurs people “to rewild, to animate, / to live / and / die, a good death.”

Khurram also draws on José Esteban Muñoz’s influential theorization of queer futurity, which foregrounds the power of anticipation.⁴ So does Gavini. She argues that the greenwood in Maurice, as a haven of queer safety and love, anticipates the possibility of a secure, queer joy that Forster could only fleetingly glimpse and grasp in his own lifetime—during visits to the home of the gay couple Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, for instance.

Queering hope and anticipation, like queering joy, produces affects and effects that may not always coincide with (hetero)normative or straightforward interpretations of these emotions.⁵ Thornley reminds us that queer joy does not have “a built-in redemption arc or a telos unshakably oriented toward ‘positive impacts’ or ‘connecting communities.’” Nor does he believe that queerness is inherently progressive, in the sense of being non-normative or anti-normative (a belief that the flourishing literature on homonormativity would seem to confirm).⁶ But he finds hope, all the same, in queerness’s “basic open-mindedness” and “willingness to experiment with alternative forms of social organization.” For him, these qualities render queer people capable, should they choose, of building new normativities and better more-than-human communities and worlds.

“Queer joy does not always or only reside in relationships or places filled with positive or progressive sentiment. It can be found in death’s wake; it can be conjured up by the prospect of death.”

I am struck, finally, by the recurring anticipation of death throughout this series. Stephens and Sprinkle represent interment in the earth as an act of queer intimacy and a source of queer joy. Khurram hopes for “a good death,” and O’Brien hopes that her care for the Earth while she lives will grant her a good rest in the earth after her death. These sentiments bespeak a queer approach to death, one that understands it “as part of a dynamic material continuum” with life rather than the antithesis to life. They also deexceptionalize human death, seeing it “as a vibrant part of the cyclic, intergenerational, shapeshifting processes of more-than-human becoming and decomposing within the framework of bio- and geo-egalitarian ecologies of planetary companionship and co-evolving.”⁷ In other words—and to recall my opening vignette—queer joy does not always or only reside in relationships or places filled with positive or progressive sentiment. It can be found in death’s wake; it can be conjured up by the prospect of death. Future researchers of queer joy should therefore expect to find this emotion, and even to search for it, in unexpected human and more-than-human bonds and spaces. They should be prepared, as I was not, to be surprised by queer joy.

Feature Image: “Acceptance art asexual” by homegets.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Notes

1. Shirley Petten, “Holmwood” (in memoriam column), Victoria Times-Colonist, December 9, 2002. ↩︎
2. Shirley Petten, “Holmwood” (in memoriam column), Victoria Times-Colonist, December 9, 1998; Shirley Petten, “Holmwood” (in memoriam column), Victoria Times-Colonist, December 9, 2000. ↩︎
3. Luke Clossey, Kyle Jackson, Brandon Marriott, Andrew Redden, and Karin Vélez, “The Unbelieved and Historians, Part I: A Challenge,” History Compass 14, no. 12 (2016): 594–602. ↩︎
4. José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009). ↩︎
5. I argue for a similarly complex understanding of hope in this blog post. ↩︎
6. For a recent critical introduction to this concept, see Sharif Mowlabocus, Interrogating Homonormativity: Gay Men, Identity, and Everyday Life (Palgrave, 2021). ↩︎
7. Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska, “Queer Death Studies in Times of Anthropocene Necropolitics and the Search for New Ethico-Political Imaginations,” in Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies, ed. Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, and Marietta Radomska (Routledge, 2026), 11. ↩︎

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Tina Adcock

I'm an associate professor in the Department of History at Simon Fraser University, where I research and teach Canadian and environmental history. I'm the author of *A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North* (UBC Press, 2025). I'm also the editor of *Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History* (UBC Press, 2018, co-edited with Edward Jones-Imhotep) and *Landscapes of Science* (NiCHE, 2019). My current research focuses on the history of the Alberta oil sands and on queer women couples in western Canada.

Latest posts by Tina Adcock (see all)

• Surprised by Queer Joy - July 2, 2026
• Review of Wiseman, Frontier Science - December 10, 2025
• New Book – A Cold Colonialism: Modern Exploration and the Canadian North - June 3, 2025
• The Place Where You Live: China and India - December 6, 2024
• Environmental History at #chashc2019 - May 30, 2019
• Introducing ‘Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History’ - May 15, 2019
• Canadian Environmental History at ASEH 2019 - April 5, 2019
• Landscapes of Science: The E-book! - February 19, 2019
• Canadian Environmental History at ASEH 2018 - March 12, 2018
• Burrard Environmental History Group - November 27, 2017