Queering Un/Common Ecologies of Death
2018 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
The ecological crises – often seen as a key component of the Anthropocene - render certain habitats unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and populations. While some indicate that the notion of the Anthropocene reinforces the hegemonic position and exceptionalism of the human subject, it also becomes evident that, in this context, the stories of species extinction and nonhuman death are profoundly entangled with the histories of colonial violence and elimination of the non-normative human other.
Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency, commonality and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between human and nonhuman animals, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an event that distinguishes human from other organisms. This split is paralleled by a dualistic approach to the human corpse itself: ‘dead’ matter is predominantly framed by either the secularised discourse on the sanctity and uniqueness of the dead body, or the narratives on its ‘abject’ character.
There is a lack of sufficient theorising of the messy intimacies between materialities of human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying. Our cultural understandings require narratives attentive to relationalities and entanglements of the living and non-living, and human and nonhuman, which I call ‘ecologies of death’.
By reading select contemporary eco-artworks and philosophical and scientific accounts on death in a more-than-human world through one another, this paper aims to explore and queer the ecologies and ontologies of death in the un/common world of the Anthropocene.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018.
Keywords [en]
death, the non/living, ecologies of death, new materialism, gender, bioart, nonhuman death, queer death studies, posthumanities, matter
National Category
Other Humanities not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-161788OAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-161788DiVA, id: diva2:1369037
Conference
(Un)Common Worlds: Human-Animal Studies Conference, 7-9 August 2018, Turku, FI.
Projects
Ecologies of Death: Environment, Body and Ethics in Contemporary Art
Funder
Swedish Research Council, 2017-004672019-11-102019-11-102019-11-10