Queering the Anthropocene: Radical Ecocritical Perspectives on the End of the World in Global Literature and Media
Description
As environmental crises intensify, ecocriticism has emerged as a vital interdisciplinary lens for examining how literature and media represent, challenge, and reimagine human relationships with the natural world. Invested in the idea that, in such times, the center cannot [and should not] hold, this seminar explores how queer ecocritical approaches reveal the de-centering cultural, ethical, and political possibilities embedded in apocalyptic environmental narratives in both literary texts and visual media. By analyzing diverse forms—ranging from contemporary climate fiction to environmental documentaries and speculative ecologies in digital media and video games—this panel ultimately seeks to understand how storytelling shapes ecological consciousness, catalyzing radical responses to environmental degradation that potentially foster new kinds of kinship structures.
The seminar invites papers that interrogate the aesthetics and politics of ecological representation in a time of global trauma. Building on last year’s seminar related to queer homecoming, this seminar explores shifting understandings of belonging when our planetary home has grown toxic. Theoretically, it is invested in considering how ecocriticism might be synthesized with queer studies, using the work of scholars like Eben Kirksey who frame the bacterial world as offering estranging models for a “queer endosymbiotic love,” for a flourishing of queer communities during ecological crisis. We take seriously Lee Edelman’s challenge to move beyond the “Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” in his influential explorations of the death drive, to ask: what new futures might be available? What imaginaries lie before us at the end of the world as we know it?
Other questions that we hope to explore: How do narrative strategies in literature and media engage with concepts such as the Anthropocene, environmental justice, extinction, and sustainability? How do marginalized voices—Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, and diasporic—offer alternative ecological epistemologies that push beyond definite endings toward rebirth, transformation, and solidarity? What role do affect, imagination, and genre play in confronting ecological grief and fostering a queer kind of planetary care?
We particularly welcome interdisciplinary perspectives that combine literary analysis, media studies, environmental humanities, and cultural theory. Papers may consider works from any time period or geography, with a focus on how ecocritical analysis can offer new insights into environmental discourse and strategies for activism and resistance. This seminar aims to foster dialogue across literary and media disciplines, highlighting the power of narrative to critique extractivist ideologies and envision more just ecological queer futures.
Please note that we seek papers from across disciplines and genres as well as pieces of creative work and visual media.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Sheng Chiang is a PhD candidate in Chinese and Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. His prospective dissertation, Queer Worldliness in Times of Crisis, theorizes queer vulnerabilities and potentialities in relation to contemporary catastrophes. He explores how Sinophone writers, artists, and filmmakers interweave queer loves and longings into their reflections on the human and more-than-human consequences of crises such as wars, environmental disasters, and pandemics.
Speaker Bio
Qiyan Chen is currently a PhD student in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. She works on Sinophone studies, media ecology and environmentalism. Her current video and space art projects are supported by the Mellon-funded Speculative Environmental Futures Grant. She holds a MA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University, and a BS in Biological Science and BA in Literature from Peking University (Beijing, China).
Speaker Bio
Carlotta Mele is currently pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a literary translator from English into Italian, translating mostly YA novels and non fiction. Her research interests reside in contemporary Italian literature, African American literature, race studies, translation studies, the environmental humanities.
Speaker Bio
Ying-hsiu Lu is an assistant professor at the International College of Tunghai University, Taiwan. Her research explores the interconnections between the body, gender, and sexuality in late imperial Chinese literature. Her recent publications, “Gender, Body Politics and Sexual Morality in Three Late Ming Homoerotic Stories” and “Male Bonding and Homosocial Desire in the Nineteenth-Century Chinese Homoerotic Novel, Pinhua baojian ,” focus on homoeroticism and male friendships.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ozichukwu Ifesie is a first-year PhD student in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, Canada. His research straddles trauma and memory studies, the environmental humanities, and colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial thought, with a particular focus on cultural and literary studies. Beyond his critical work, he also engages in creative practices in prose and in envisioning more peaceful worlds.
Speaker Bio
Rebecca Ehrenwirth is an Assistant Professor of Translation (Chinese-German) at the University of Applied Sciences/SDI Munich. Among others, she is the author of “Living In/With Ambiguity: ‘Passing’ in Mu Cao’s In the Face of Death We Are All Equal” (2024). She is a founding member and the current Secretary-Treasurer of the Society of Sinophone Studies. Her research interests include Sinophone Studies, Translation Studies, and Queer Studies.
Speaker Bio
Victoria Olwell is an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Genius of Democracy: Fictions of Gender and Citizenship in the U.S., as well as of a number of articles in Signs, American Literature, and American Literary History. Her current work focuses on two areas: contemporary Anglo-American ecodrama and the politics of consent in U.S. literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef is Associate Professor in Film & Media Studies at Texas Tech University. His book, No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema (SUNY Press, 2022), reveals genre cinema's multivalent purpose: to normalize state violence and also to critique it. His work on global cinema has appeared in journals like Japanese Language and Literature, The Journal of Popular Culture, and Quarterly Review of Film and Video.
Speaker Bio
Shangrila Plaza is a Master’s student in English at Simon Fraser University. Their SSHRC-funded MA project is a digital sound map of Metro Manila that traces sites where neocolonial sounds persist and shape the city’s ecological and cultural landscape. In their free time, they write poetry and gallivant around with a field recorder, chasing the sounds of cityscapes and waterscapes like a sonic tourist.
Speaker Bio
Ali Reza Shahbazin holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from McGill University. His dissertation examines modes of dwelling in cosmopolitan public spaces as portrayed in The Alexandria Quartet (1957) by British novelist Lawrence Durrell. In 2022, Shahbazin received the William Godshalk Prize for New Durrell Scholarship from the International Lawrence Durrell Society. His broader interests lie in urban spaces at the intersection of architecture and narrativity. He has published two novels in Persian.