With this seminar, we seek to theorize how queer excess emerges as both a praxis and condition of non-normative relationality. We take our inspiration from Arthur Jafa's 2025/26 MoMA exhibition Less Is Morbid, which foregrounded Black, feminist, and queer life forms that are often understood as excessive. By echoing Jafa’s assertion that “less is morbid,” we seek contributions that consider how the “affective capacities” of creative work—irrespective of media, author, or originary context—can be marshalled to resignify or challenge the primacy of the death drive within discussions of queer critique. Pulling from the vast archives of the MoMA’s permanent collection and guided by an appreciation for that which exceeds paradigms of compositional order, Jafa inverted dominant narratives about modernity’s essential minimalism and our enduring suspicion of ornament by juxtaposing works in novel configurations animated by what Jafa identifies as a “counter death wish” that affirms and amplifies myriad forms of difference. We ask: How might this wish be understood as the drive undergirding queer modes of stylistic and ethical maximalism?

A non-exhaustive list of questions includes:

- What can queer excess offer to ecological thought by rethinking waste, redundancy, and artifice?
- How do queer figurations of surplus, recklessness, and decadence exceed or disrupt modes of both capitalist austerity and affluence?
- How does queer excess rethink the boundaries of texts and forms as well as the lineages in which we situate them? How do queer artists, writers, and thinkers avail themselves of techniques such as collage, montage, assemblage, digression, installation, drag, and camp performativity to subvert the power of rationalizing epistemes?
- What new approaches to the death drive can queer theory develop in response to the “death wish” of capitalist cisheteropatriarchy?
- How might forms of the necropastoral, documentary poetics, New Narrative, diaristic and performative explorations of the everyday life—among other genres and tactics—recondition our notions of how the queer not only comes into being but flourishes?

In this moment of mass extinction, mass deportations, and fascistic attempts to purge the body politic of that which is deemed anathematic or pollutive to the white straight hegemony—the queer, the marginalized, the foreign, the weird, the wily, the dilatory, the deviant and disabled—how can queer theory and queer texts overcome the reigning politics of simplification and regimentation? Believing that a new, different world is possible, we invite seminar participants to join us in thinking how we might all survive together.

Please send abstracts of 250 words and a brief bio to Samia Rahimtoola, [email protected], and Brandon Menke, [email protected].