Lee Edelman’s provocative and infamous call to “fuck the social order…and the future that serves as its prop,” while a site of fierce debate in queer studies, would seem to read as irrelevant at best, or rather at odds, with environmentalist efforts, which tend to focus on efforts to ensure our future, to repair or save the planet so we can have a future (2004, 29). As environmental humanities scholar Nicole Seymour puts it, queer theory’s “so-called negative turn…has worked against the development of queer ecological stances” (2013, 6). Even before the concept of the Anthropocene was proposed, environmental scientists, activists, and ethicists (among others) have poured a great deal of attention to exploring how to undo the harms humans have done to the earth—as the call for papers noted, this was suggested in the very essay that coined the term.
Yet these efforts to restore our planet, while laudable, have often been counterproductive or have been entangled with oppressive systems and ideologies. For instance, Seymour points out that “much environmentalist discourse depends on, or even requires, a white-centric heterosexism, if not homophobia” (2013, viii). And Jenny Price explores at length how we have paradoxically sought to save the environment through “virtuous acts of consumption” which “actually create more environmental problems than they solve” (2012, 19). Price, a devoted environmentalist, argues in response that we should “stop saving the planet!,” calling for a different approach, Noting that Price’s “stop saving the planet” bears at least some family resemblance to Edelman’s anti-futurity, this paper considers what a different approach might entail, turning to queer theories of negativity as a resource and placing them in conversation with contemporary eco-theologies.
In his essay “The Lure of the Apocalypse,” Kyle Lambelet explores the value of apocalyptic environmentalism read through a theo-ethical lens. Attending to how the Christian apocalyptic tradition is focused on revelation, on disclosing our present reality, and how the reality of the Anthropocene is one of emergency given the impact of climate change, Lambelet considers the possibilities within “hoping for the end of the world as we know it” (2021, 495). Lambelet goes on to sketch out a proposal for “apocalypse as a spiritual exercise” (493ff). Given, again, the ways in which environmentalism is bound up with heteronormativity, this paper explores what queer negativity, in conversation with theology, might add to Lambelet’s proposals.
After briefly introducing both Lambelet’s argument and key tenets of queer ecology (read: outlining how environmentalism gets bound up with (hetero) normativity and how it challenges that entanglement), this paper will explore what it might mean not to try to save the planet, but rather to critically examine and ethically undo our malformed relation to it—asking what needs to be undone, to be destroyed, to live ethically in the Anthropocene.
First, it will explore queer negativity’s anti-sociality; tracing overlap between Lambelet and Edelman, the paper will explore how the anti-social turn, like apocalypticism, is a rejection of the world as it is now—that it’s critique is an ethical expression that judges and renounces the exploitative and harmful structures and patterns that have led us to the age of the Anthropocene. From there, it will turn to queer negativity’s antihumanism, its emphasis on self-shattering, identifying theological variants in ethical turns to kenosis. Focusing particularly on Sallie McFague’s notion of kenosis as a way of life, it outlines how this framework offers us resources for spiritual practice towards eschewing our climate-harming consumeristic capitalist subjectivities, and opens up space for decentering ourselves in relation to the whole of creation (2013, 141ff).
Taking seriously Lynn White’s assertion that “more science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecologic crisis until we find a new religion, or rethink our old one,” this paper steps back and calls for a rethinking of the very idea of what it might mean to get us out of this mess—drawing on theology and queer theory to do so (1967, 1206).
Works Cited:
Edelman, Lee. 2013. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press.
Lambelet, Kyle. 2021. “The Lure of the Apocalypse: Ecology, Ethics, and the End of the World.” Studies in Christian Ethics 34(4): 482-497.
McFague, Sallie. 2013. Blessed are the Consumers: Climate Change and the Practice of Restraint. Fortress Press.
Price, Jenny. 2012. “Stop Saving the Planet—and Other Tips via Rachel Carson for Twenty-First-Century Environmentalist.” RCC Perspectives 7: 11-30.
Seymour, Nicole. 2013. Futurity, Empathy, and the Queer Ecological Imagination. University of Illinois Press.
White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (3767): 1203-1207.
Before the concept of the Anthropocene was even proposed, environmental scientists, activists, and ethicists (among others) have poured a great deal of attention to exploring how to undo the harms humans have done to the earth. What is presupposed in this hopeful pursuit? Are there limits to and/or consequences of it? And are there different ways of thinking environmental ethics? This paper explores these questions, turning to both queer theories of negativity and contemporary eco-theologies as a resource. Building on Christian ethicist Kyle Lambelet’s proposal for apocalypse as a spiritual practice, this paper explores what the antisocial turn in queer theory might offer and considers eco-theological corollaries. In doing so, it explores what it might mean not to try to save the planet, but rather to critically examine and ethically undo our malformed relation to it.