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Queer Lasting
What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse
What does it mean to be at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? To be “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, but what would it mean if only the lasting remained? When faced with the abrupt end to the continuities of ecology and nature, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the ‘future.’ Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She turns to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.
Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—persisting and ending—are constitutively intertwined, Sarah Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s spread of the AIDS epidemic, which threatened the total loss of gay lives and specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its many-shaded intimacy with death, offers us a rich archive to produce new ways of thinking through our environmental cataclysm.
Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the paradigms that environmentalism avoids, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.
What does it mean to be at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? To be “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, but what would it mean if only the lasting remained? When faced with the abrupt end to the continuities of ecology and nature, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the ‘future.’ Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She turns to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of the present.
Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—persisting and ending—are constitutively intertwined, Sarah Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s spread of the AIDS epidemic, which threatened the total loss of gay lives and specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its many-shaded intimacy with death, offers us a rich archive to produce new ways of thinking through our environmental cataclysm.
Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the paradigms that environmentalism avoids, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.
- GenresNonfictionQueerLGBT
287 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
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February 6, 2025The main argument hinges on the difference between nouns and gerunds (and I finally understand the popular use of the term 'grammar' in certain strands of contemporary theory), i.e. future vs. lasting. I'm not convinced. More meanly, I could say that it's just a repackaged Deleuze's becoming vs. being argument. Where Negative Life: The Cinema of Extinction repeated Lacan, this one just revisits old ontological haunts in an attempt to salvage what can be salvaged from relational ontology.
August 22, 2024
i don’t know if i’m the best authority to review this book but i appreciate the ARC from netgalley, NYU press and Sara Ensor.
this book is extremely dry and written with scholar and collegiate readers in mind. i felt like i was trudging through the book, and it took me days to continue to try to get through portions, at times.
i think the concept is interesting, and i like reading books on queer theories but i simply don’t know what to make of this book and the presentation. i don’t think the subject matter is particularly wrong or unimportant, i just don’t think the presentation is for me, a lay reader who simply likes queer books.
again i appreciate the arc, i appreciate even the concept but this is a book i will not be revisiting in the future.
this book is extremely dry and written with scholar and collegiate readers in mind. i felt like i was trudging through the book, and it took me days to continue to try to get through portions, at times.
i think the concept is interesting, and i like reading books on queer theories but i simply don’t know what to make of this book and the presentation. i don’t think the subject matter is particularly wrong or unimportant, i just don’t think the presentation is for me, a lay reader who simply likes queer books.
again i appreciate the arc, i appreciate even the concept but this is a book i will not be revisiting in the future.
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June 10, 2025q
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews