Queer Lasting

What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse What does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, 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 looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living 'at the last' is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that 'to last' is itself also one way to go on. Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor