This Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive, international cartography of Queer Death Studies, offering broad, in-depth insights into the field and its emergence through tentacular transdisciplinary networking. Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning and afterlife into new directions, it explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth’s history, ‘The Anthropocene’ or ‘the Age of Man’.
Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world’s intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning or species.
A thought provoking read, this Handbook is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, artists, teachers, students, death-professionals, (health)careworkers, activists and NGOs interested in tools to rethink and reimagine death, dying, mourning and afterlife from intersections of queering, decolonising, posthumanising and feminist perspectives.
1. Queer Death Studies: In Times of Anthropocene Necropolitics and the Search for New Ethico-Political Imaginations
PART I. Rethinking Life/Death Ecologies and Temporalities
Introduction
2. Extinction and the Deep Time of Death
3. Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art
4. Life/Death Ecologies and Temporalities of Bioart: A Conversation
5. Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens
6. Dis(re)membering Death in Eco-horror Forests
7. The Time of Hybrid Corals: Laboratory Experiments in Extinction and Survival
8. Extinction Companion Species: Bare Death, Response-(in)ability, and Human/Non-human Dis/connections
9. Posthuman Genetic Legacies: Queering Fertility and (Im)mortality through Biological Arts Practice
PART II. Anthropocene Necropolitics and Extinction
Introduction
10. The Necropolitics of Care: And How to Dismantle the Master’s House
11. Killable Bodies and Necro-Value in Times of COVID: An Ethnography of Death in Iran Through a Feminist-Queer Lens
12. Metamorphic Necropolitics: Deadly Othering in European East–West Power Relations
13. Affective Necropolitics: The Promise of Protection and its Deadly Ends
14. ‘A Gentle Touch’: Imaginaries for Killing Fish Humanely on Social Media
15. Making Death on a Molecular Scale: Transgenic Mosquitoes, More-Than-Human Biopolitics, and the Emergence of Necrovalue
16. The Making and Burning of Borders: On Historicity, Storytelling, and Forensic Methods – A Conversation
17. Ecocide, Ecological Grief, and the Power of Telling Stories – A Conversation
18. Alt-right Memes and Microspectropolitics: Posthumanising and Queering Schild & Vrienden’s Memetic Activism
19. Against Abstractions: On Geo-Politics, Humanness, Virus, and Death
20. Frames of Palestinian Childhood and the End of Man
PART III. Caring Death Activism
Introduction
21. Death Activism and the Living World
22. Queer Ecologies of Death at my Desk: Sinking into the Toxic Legacy of Artistic and Academic Practice
Margherita Pevere
23. Dying All the Time: Violent Ecologies at the End of Life
24. Saving Queer and Trans People from ‘Bad’ Deaths: Suicide Prevention as ‘Cruel Optimism’ in Suicidist Contexts
25. A Beautiful Passing: The Story of my Mother’s Euthanasia
26. A Good Day to Die? On Assisted Suicide and Vibrant Dying
27. ‘A Life Cut Short’: US-American Death Doulas, Life Expectancy, and Queering the Future
PART IV. Aesthetics and Mediated Imaginaries of Death
Introduction
28. For a Queer Topography of Female Necrophilia: The Neon-Gothic Aesthetics
29. The Trans-Death Continuum
30. Queerness, Contagion, Noise: The Death of the (Sexual-Sonic) Subject Constitutes a Queer Noise Moment
31. Queering Death, Desire, and Intimacy: The Cinematic Ecology in Lou Ye’s Spring Fever
32. Affective Mapping of David Wojnarowicz’s Selected Works
33. Necro-Art: Material (After)Life
34. The Ambivalence of Exposure: Splicing Time in Tom Bianchi’s Fire Island Pines Polaroids
35. Queer Complicity, Queer Instauration, and Digital (Im)mortality, or: How to Think About Mourning and Our Cyberselves
36. Queering the Transhumanist Imaginaries of Life after Death: A Deconstructionist Approach to Cryonics and Mind-Uploading
PART V. Politics and Ethics of Grieving Practices and Remembrance
Introduction
37. Between Silence and Silencing, Stories Are Told: Documentary Narratives on Queer Elders and the Re-Writing of History
Gustavo Haiden de Lacerda, and Geniane Diamante Ferreira
38. Living with the Dead: Grief Politics and Discourses on Nationalism and Modernity in Georgia
Mariam Shalvashvili
39. Gender Affirming or Disenfranchised Grief? Considering Death Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand
Gareth Schott, Benjamin Doyle, and Wairehu Grant
40. Remaking Death at the Beginning of Life: Living with Technological Decisions
41. From the Baquiné to the Streets: Performances of Grief
42. Caring to Keep One’s Impressions Alive
43. Beyond Transgression: Sexuality, Death and the ‘Human’ in a Post-Shoah Memorial
44. Queer Grief: From a Public Feeling to Private Grieving
45. Permeable Membranes and Prosthetic Fluids: Narrating my Father’s Death
PART VI. Co-Becoming with the Dead and Spectral Mourning
Introduction
46. The Bedana and the Wanderer
47. Obuntu Bulamu: A Decolonial African Feminist Reconceptualisation of Death and Mourning
48. Griefly Related: Continuing Friendship After Death
49. Being, Entangled, and Re‘turn’ed in Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book
50. Betty (or Libby), Kitty, and Cookie: The (De)Queering of Elizabeth Short, Catherine Genovese, and Sylvia Likens
51. Archival Activism and Necropolitics in the You Tube Series Queer Ghost Hunters
52. Dust, Documentation, and The Book of the Dead
53. Posthuman Touch and Mourning within the Realm of the Performative: Narratives of Queer, More-than-Human, and Revolutionary Ghosts
54. The Haunting Return of the Mutant Zombie Mink: On Ghost Story Writing as Poetics, Ethics and Method
55. Decolonising Mourning: World-Making with the Selk’nam People of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego
PART VII. Imagining Life/Death Entanglements Differently
Introduction
56. Re/orienting to Death
57. Eurydice in the Underworld
58. Queer Reading, Queer Dying
59. Decomposing Wood: Instructions for Survival in the Scraps of Ruin and Collapse
60. mythographies of decomposition
61. Death and Distributed Minds: Creative Speculations on Extended Spider Cognition
62. Passing Strange: The Queer Dimensions of Pandemic Death
63. What If Every Critter’s Death Was Vibrant? Figuring Ethics Between Ecologies of Gifting and Extinction
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