Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Gender Studies and Sexuality
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Towards A Queer Southernism: The Role of Women And LGBT+ Groups in House Movement of Palermo
Lydia R. Cooper
ABSTRACT:
While much has been written on the possibilities of “cli-fi,” fiction about climate change, to describe the complexities of the global environmental crisis, this paper explains how queer cli-fi helps us understand the affective experience of living through climate catastrophe while imagining an antidote to catastrophic life: caregiving. The question of how we care for others is, perhaps, even more important than the question of immediate survival in the context of global emergency. Specifically, using trauma theory and queer affect theory, this talk will analyze Rivers Solomon’s award-winning speculative novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), about an intersex medic, a trans doctor, and a spaceship hurtling toward earth, as a case study. The novel offers a provocative challenge to our understanding of climate collapse, trauma, and resilience by locating generative care and nurture, for both human and nonhuman life, in trans and intersex nonprocreative and nonprocreating characters. Through depicting trans and intersex experiences of difference, relationality, and affective liberation, the novel shifts the genre’s traditional arc of futurism from focusing on human survival to imagining how human communities might be radically reimagined so as to secure a future worth living in.
keywords: cli-fi, intersex, literature, transgender, queer