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AbstractThe present article takes the recurrent motif of trees in Ali Smith’s oeuvre as a point of departure to analyze how Smith forges an alliance between environmental concerns and queerness. It argues that her short stories present their own version of queer ecology on both a conceptual and aesthetic level. Smith queers ecological relations and brings ecological concerns to bear on the queer on multiple scales, continuously disrupting linear narratives, anthropocentric thinking and capitalist imperatives of (re)production and productivity for the benefit of interdepenence, resistance and inter-species care. By means of non-linear storytelling, ambiguous pronouns and shifting narrative perspective she aesthetically and conceptually opens space for queer desires, interspecies care and a cyclical, distinctly ecological view of queer futurity that ultimately extends not just to environmental and social but also cultural relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Quebecois author Kevin Lambert's debut novel, Tu aimeras ce que tu as tué, a disquieting story of slaughtered children who come back to the Canadian town of Chicoutimi to live normal lives in it before destroying it. The apocalyptic dimension of this tale of destruction lives up to the etymological root of apocalypse, apokalyptein ("to uncover, disclose, reveal" in Greek) by centering the narrative around a revelation of the violence that is inherent to heteronormative culture but occulted by its position of dominance. This violence, which targets the figure of the innocent child, the standard-bearer of heterosexuality in its reproductive futurity, is, through the prophetic rage of the narrator, a child named Faldistoire, turned back upon the respectable adults who stamp out not only the lives of children but their nonnormative desires and impulses—their freedom. The novel puts forth apocalypse as a model for the work of literature itself—revelation that rends normative reality in order to replace it with something else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by the life and works of GrammyAward® winning artist, Lil Nas X, we explore ways a young Black queer musician has enacted emancipatory utopias to disrupt dominant cultural modes of being—offering unapologetic expressions and expansions of race, gender, and sexual identity. In this paper, we draw upon José Esteban Muñoz and Ytasha Womak to consider how utopian thinking through the lenses of queer futurity and Afrofuturism provides a way to dismantle the hegemonic and proleptic trappings of music education and contemplate how music learners and teachers might enact emancipatory utopias relevant to their own historically lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically, the end of the world occurred again and again for various subjects in the frame of colonization, mass extinction and continued dispossession of populations. Such a conception of the recurrent end dislodges a linear idea of time and a modernist narrative of progress which surfaces in various discourses concerned with the Anthropocene. Here, the end of the world equals the end of humanity while staging the universal human subject as a collective agent of preventing such an apocalyptic scenario. This article draws on critical work on the end of worlds, queer speculative futurity and critical fabulation to carve out narrative techniques for resisting the uniform temporality of what we term apocalyptic realism. Proposing the idea of speculative fabulation, we foreground the power of speculative engagements with futurity against their subsumption under an all-too-human casting of the future as the dominant narrative mode of Anthropocene's present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads the aunties on the peripheries of Hanif Kureishi and Stephen Frear's film, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), as minor figures, enacting a methodological turn to the seemingly insignificant in analyses of South Asian culture and sexuality. I ask why the aunties' desire feels so impossible, especially in a film centred on a Pakistani protagonist's queer utopia. Both ubiquitous and precluded from a complexity of desire, representations of the Pakistani aunty suffer from a deficit of imagination. Aunties tend to be shown as middle-aged women who surveil and police their kin and have a neutered or absent sexuality, as the film's paradigmatic figuration of the aunty exemplifies. This article argues that such creative constraint derives from the construction of female sexuality as deviance in South Asia, and then tries to look beyond these constraints. While asking what a more capacious imagining of the aunty and her desires might make possible, I offer parameters for reading sexuality in Pakistan and its diasporas by foregrounding deprivation of pleasure and choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers an alternative form of reconciliation with my abuelita who passed away unexpectedly from a stroke in 2021. Beginning with her career as a professional singer refuting gender roles in Spain, I consider the trajectory of her life that led to her adulthood as a conservative Jehovah's Witness. Through speculative memory work and queer futurity, this essay queers abuelita in a way that reimagines her life as a musician, performer, and grandmother. I offer this as an example of how queer individuals negotiate and address the contradictions of reconciliation and queerness on their own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes up the notion of the "child redeemer" to explore how the future in contemporary Japan has been depicted or represented in post-3/11 art and literature via the deployment of the figure of the child. In particular, it focusses on the statue called The Sun Child created by Yanobe Kenji in 2012, and the novel The Emissary [Kentōshi] written by Tawada Yōko in 2014. Both Yanobe and Tawada respond to the Fukushima nuclear disaster by using the figure of the child as a means of imagining and representing a future for Japan in the aftermath of environmental crisis. However, these two texts (visual and literary) imagine starkly different kinds of futurity as they extrapolate both foreseeable and unforeseeable futures through this child figure. I draw upon Lee Edelman's queer theory of "reproductive futurism" and José E. Muñoz's notion of "queer futurity" to analyse how Yanobe and Tawada attempt to translate the precarious future emerging in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe into their visual and literary works. I argue that The Sun Child reiterates a developmentalist ideology of futurity, whereas The Emissary portrays an alternative futurity, imagining new ways of living in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skateboarding has been thought to possess a certain alternative 'potential' to challenge prevalent inequalities in sport. However, skateboarding remains a largely hetero-masculine domain. As such, queer identities have been marginalized and relegated to a peripheral space. Nevertheless, radical scenes of young queer skateboarders are offering alternative definitions and possibilities for what it means to be a skateboarder and do skateboarding. Through Jack Halberstam's concept of queer failure and José Esteban Muñoz's queer futurity and utopianism, I investigate how queer skateboarders are tapping into a queer potential that persists in the practice and aesthetic of skateboarding through the symbolism of the child and camp. They use this potential to affirm their identities as simultaneously queer and skaters. In so doing, today's young queer skateboarders are changing the landscape of skateboarding by queering and claiming space for themselves within the largely heteronormative dominant industry and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article interrogates how both visual culture and queer futurity can be made visible in and through the Philippine archive as a case in point. It begins by problematizing a paradoxical specter of futurity that seems to haunt more the Global North. But despite such haunting, the Philippines in the Global South continues to have thin to nil (i.e., nearly absent) envisioning toward a queer futurity, for most Filipino LGBTQIA + scholars seem to still be engaged in recovering "lost histories" from the archives and "thick descriptions" of the present, while focusing more on the textual than the visual. The article then proceeds to discuss mobilizing ekphrasis and representation as main conceptual tools in bridging the temporally opposite projects of queer archiving and queer futurity. It analyzes through ekphrastic re-reading the various LGBTQIA + representations from the Philippine archive – that is, a "palimpsestic site" of colonial confrontations, national (re)construction, and potentially global queer critique. These re-readings along the archival grain juxtapose the archival representations as historically authentic vis-à-vis their more present-day representations as visual proxies. Yet more crucially, the potency of these ekphrastic re-readings – in lieu of visually actual – lies in their capacity to reverberate queer possibilities, re-awakening them from their sleep within the archives, and thus re-mobilizing them toward becoming a useful part of academics, activists, and artists' "shared arsenal" in re-envisioning and, hopefully in time, reifying such past possibilities into future queer actualities anew. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through Butler's Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana's experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana's subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. Through rendering disability both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present and the future. The different figurations of space and time exposed through Dana's time travelling help conceptualize her accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has been extensively focusing on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century, however, there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological displacement of Dana, as a black female body, exposes her traumatization and the difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a history of violence and exploitation. Even though Kindred was written before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, it could be analysed in a way that asserts the continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in USA and the crisis of blackness in the future. Systematic violence threatens black women's wholeness and renders their bodies at risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text is based on extracts of the research that I originally presented at the 'Cruising the 1970s' conference 'Imagining Queer Europe Then and Now' in Edinburgh, March 2019; it is in dialogue with a text that I authored for The Funambulist's 'Futurisms' issue (no 24, July/August 2019) called 'On Fantasy, Placelessness and Queer Futurity'. It includes two new poetic extracts. This short text delivers an intimate articulation of José Esteban Muñoz's work in relation to Audre Lorde's poetry as a possible way to think about queer of colour survival in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical queer analysis of Star Trek as a history of the future. Juxtaposing two episodes of queerness from Star Trek's canon with the show's depiction of gay characters in its latest drama series, the paper unpacks the multiple levels of queerness that are at once facilitated and restricted by the show's visions of the future. Drawing on discussions of queer futurity, it argues for the usefulness of a queer reparative reading strategy in intervening in heteronormative models of the future and opening up potentialities for queer world-making. ST: TOS: Star Trek: The Original Series; ST: TNG: Star Trek: The Next Generation; ST: DS9: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; ST: VOY: Star Trek: Voyager; ST: ENT: Star Trek: Enterprise; ST: DIS: Star Trek: Discovery [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Susanna Centlivre’s The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) presents a model of female relations invested in queer futurity and queer temporality, disrupting the patriarchal geometry of courtship in order to provide the play’s heroines access to an alternate future grounded in their relationship with one another. Though the play ends with both women married, their relationship is central and is cemented by Violante’s marriage to Isabella’s brother, which transforms the friends into sisters. Their dedication opens up the possibility that a relationship between women might be more important than the marriages they strive for, illustrating an important intervention into the construction of plot in comedy from the early eighteenth century. The Wonder’s queer potential is developed in the language that both women use to describe their devotion and the actions that embody it. Violante and Isabella are able to expand the triangle of homosocial exchange into a more equitable square that not only allows for happy marriages but visible, loving relationships between the play’s heroines. As such, they manage to create a queer future where their relationship can remain at the forefront of their lives and rewrite the marriage plot as a means to an end.

This article considers how André De Shields performance in Hadestown (2019), and the musicals Fun Home (2015) and A Strange Loop (2019) can be seen to respond to the present moment and argues that they disrupt heteronormative temporality through queer dramaturgy. It explores musicals that present queer performativity and/or queer dramaturgies, and addresses how they enact queer strategies of resistance through historical materialist critiques of personal biographies. It suggests that to do this, they disrupt the heteronormative dramaturgical time of the musical, and considers how they may enact structural change to the form of the musical. The article carries out a close reading of De Shields’ performance practice, and analyses the dramaturgy of Fun Home and A Strange Loop through drawing on the methodologies of José Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman. It considers how they make queer labour visible by drawing on post-dramatic strategies, ultimately suggesting that to varying extents, these musicals offer resistance to the heteronormative musical form.

Certain complications arise when it comes to national and sexual based formulas of citizenship, especially when bodies are often found in between and on the margins of nations, states, and cultures, a sign of the modern world. As such, it is important to establish new frameworks in order to understand newly emerging bodies as others. In the essay that follows, Hasan Namir's novel, God in Pink (2015), will be contextualized as a narrative that posits queerness as a means of overcoming the essentialist binaries created by colonization that dictate who and what is othered through the use of queer bodies that transform normative religious and heteronormative national identities. First, the essay will analyze the ways heteronormative national identities are queered/disturbed by calling attention to the fallacies inherent in singular national dichotomies. Secondly, the essay will address the ways in which queerness is able to transform singular national identities. In doing so, this essay will argue that queer narratives, as represented by God in Pink, in colonized spaces offer meant for transforming singular national futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a queer spatial study of the episode Chewing Gum of the Pakistani anthology series, Kitni Girhaiñ Bāqi Haiñ2 (2016- ). This 40-minute episode marked the first instance of onscreen lesbianism in Pakistani visual media, and was subject to much controversy immediately following its air date. This paper will look into how Malik constructs female queerness onscreen, and how she sees female deviant sexualities as potentially threatening to heteronormative structures, especially to the state-sponsored institution of marriage, and the sacrosanct domestic, martial space. Chewing Gum configures domesticity as a state of being closeted which is broken in and dismantled by Qandeel, a queer woman who performs heterosexuality as a means of intruding upon the private space, and then de-phallicises it. The queer women of Chewing Gum, thus, create an emancipative space which accommodates anti-nationalist and non-normative identities. Moreover, through them queer experience itself has been reimagined as being internally heterogenous, thus complicating what it means to be queer within Pakistani urban and nationalist cartographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article exposes the violences encoded within many contemporary, mainstream gay spaces and connects these violences to a wider politics of the modern LGBT movement. No longer are queer places sites of radically disrupting time, space, and social norms, a practice that in some ways were constitutive of Queerness. Instead, many queer spaces have been organized and reorganized to reflect, reinforce, and support the integrationist and assimilationist goals of contemporary gay (white, cisgender, male) liberals and the State and corporate institutions they seek to become or have become a part of. I develop this argument by undertaking Queer readings of three "gay" maps of Washington, D.C. In deconstructing the violences within spatial representations of gay spaces within the nation's capital, I hope to engage in a broader disruption and subversion of both the cooptation of queer/Queer struggle by State and multinational corporate formations and the assimilationist and (white) nationalist trends within mainstream LGBT politics that allow this to happen. In the "slippage" or "fissure" produced by this disruption, I hope to open a path that allows us to "cruise" ahead towards new thought on what can and should constitute Queer and queer politics and spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the narrative structure of K. Sello Duiker’s novels highlights a disjunction between the temporality of history’s promise and that of the encounter. In contrast to a temporality of the promise or a messianic nation “to come,” Duiker’s novels render visible those who are deemed outside of the time of nation and history, those who are considered to be the by-products of modernity: the destitute, the sick, the jobless, the homeless, the queer. In doing so, Duiker’s work dramatizes a time of encounter, or what Samuel Delany has called “contact situations,” those brief, surprising, interracial and interclass exchanges that momentarily bring about new and unscripted relationality. Focusing on the young Azure inThirteen Cents, this article argues that for Duiker, the encounter is fragile and evanescent compared with relations defined in received networks of power, networks organized by rigid fantasies of homophobic, violent masculinities and entrenched racial and economic privilege. Even so, Duiker’s work suggests that tracing itineraries of contact situations might index the potentiality of a longing in contemporary South Africa, if not for the nation as a whole, for what José Esteban Muñoz has called queer futurity: practices that suspendtelos, aim and utility in order to cultivate spaces of restructured sociality outside rigid networks profit or power, even in the context of everyday gender and sexuality-based violence within South Africa’s global present. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper traces, and is the traces of, a collective project to render a neighbourhood queer. It is a project that emerges from queer social relations. Academic research and knowledge generation are approached collaboratively by working with queer-identified residents from west-central neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada who volunteered with the Queer West ShOUT Youth Program. Within the context of two participant-facilitated discussion events, we discursively and artistically investigate queer world-making in the neighbourhood of West Queen West. Through collective mental mapping and photovoice renderings we interpret the queering of urban space as a queer utopian impulse. We critically examine the ‘concrete utopia’ of Queer West Village and question its resonance in the lives of ShOUT volunteers. Theoretically inspired by Muñoz, our ‘a/r/tographic’ mode of inquiry and critical praxis are a rendering of ‘queer futurity.’ We draw on our past to critique our lived present so as to imagine future potentialities. We do so in order to argue that it is vital that the queerness we individually and collectively strive for at the spatial scale of the neighbourhood, such as the process of place-making itself, is grounded in material experience yet remains provisional and an ideality that motivates us. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to address the question: How do we 'arrive' at queer(er) futures? To begin with, queer rethinkings of futurity need to make a radical break from logics that find their basis in heteronormativity and reproductive futurity. Sara Ahmed's concept of orientations provides a framework within which we might move beyond nostalgic narratives and the reiteration of these normative logics. Developing orientations that are critically queer (enough) will enable one to choose lines of disorientation, to remember differently, and to integrate the past and future differently in relation to the present. I also look at José Esteban Muñoz's suggestion that we put queer 'on the horizon', viewing it as potentiality for a different world. Further, I regard the element of community as an essential element in one's queer knowledge production, as 'queer' cannot exist in isolation. How to shape our bodies, lives, and worlds differently, and develop queer potentialities that might eventually materialize? In Jeanette Winterson's novel The Stone Gods, I examine how her characters are orientated, and how they reorientate themselves when obstacles throw them off course. What do they do with these queer moments? Do they invest in them, or do those moments just slip away, unnoticed? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's choice to foreground arguments from due process rather than equal protection in the majority opinion in Lawrence v. Texas. Kennedy's choice can realize constitutional legal doctrine that is more consistent with radical queer politics than arguments from equal protection. Unlike some recent critiques of Kennedy's opinion, a queer rhetorical analysis of Lawrence reveals a futuristic, always-open-to-change vision in Kennedy's rhetorical framing of constitutional law that is significantly less damaging to possibilities for “queer world making” in the United States than other contemporary US judicial arguments of and about sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Susanna Centlivre's The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret (1714) presents a model of female relations invested in queer futurity and queer temporality, disrupting the patriarchal geometry of courtship in order to provide the play's heroines access to an alternate future grounded in their relationship with one another. Though the play ends with both women married, their relationship is central and is cemented by Violante's marriage to Isabella's brother, which transforms the friends into sisters. Their dedication opens up the possibility that a relationship between women might be more important than the marriages they strive for, illustrating an important intervention into the construction of plot in comedy from the early eighteenth century. The Wonder's queer potential is developed in the language that both women use to describe their devotion and the actions that embody it. Violante and Isabella are able to expand the triangle of homosocial exchange into a more equitable square that not only allows for happy marriages but visible, loving relationships between the play's heroines. As such, they manage to create a queer future where their relationship can remain at the forefront of their lives and rewrite the marriage plot as a means to an end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how André De Shields performance in Hadestown (2019), and the musicals Fun Home (2015) and A Strange Loop (2019) can be seen to respond to the present moment and argues that they disrupt heteronormative temporality through queer dramaturgy. It explores musicals that present queer performativity and/or queer dramaturgies, and addresses how they enact queer strategies of resistance through historical materialist critiques of personal biographies. It suggests that to do this, they disrupt the heteronormative dramaturgical time of the musical, and considers how they may enact structural change to the form of the musical. The article carries out a close reading of De Shields' performance practice, and analyses the dramaturgy of Fun Home and A Strange Loop through drawing on the methodologies of José Muñoz and Elizabeth Freeman. It considers how they make queer labour visible by drawing on post-dramatic strategies, ultimately suggesting that to varying extents, these musicals offer resistance to the heteronormative musical form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]