Cancer Ecologies: A Queer Femme Portal invites readers on a winding journey through the tangled roots of the current cancer epidemic. Moving between personal accounts – one author living with cancer, the other companion to a beloved who died from it – and eco-critical reflections, the authors ask: What if cancer is not just a personal tragedy or monstrous invader, but a symptom of Earth in distress – a message from the planet itself?

The book challenges the idea of cancer as an isolated enemy to be eradicated, reading it instead as manifesting toxic entanglements of the Anthropocene: capitalist extraction, colonial exploitation, and environmental degradation. Through an eco-ethics of softness, the authors explores how cancer might be approached as a portal: as a conversation between pain and possibility, necropolitics and a vibrantly ongoing life/death cycles – and as an opening to radical tenderness, multispecies solidarity, and unexpected kinship relations.

Encouraging readers to understand themselves not as separate from Earth, but as lovers entangled with peatmoss, the microalgae, diatoms, and other humble creatures that sustain us, the authors contemplate their queerfemme-inine and critically posthuman entrypoints to a rethinking of cancer.

Cancer Ecologies experiments with a genre-bending methodology: a twinned autophenomenography, part poetic story-telling, part eco-philosophical analysis. Drawing on decolonial thought, queerfemme theory, feminist posthumanism, and conversations with scientists, the book offers a transformative rethinking of cancer: less as a battle, more as an invitation to compost grief and cultivate ongoing cycles of life/death entanglements, rooted in relationality, shared vulnerability, and practices of joy. 

Based on interviews, archival materials, and memories from the author's lesbian and socialist-feminist activism in the 1970's and 1980's in the Danish town, Odense, the chapter gives a historical presentation of the activities of the Lesbian Feminist movement, and its collaborations with other feminist organizations. From queerfeminist and queerfemme-inist perspectives, the author also reflects on the energies that shaped the movement, its cross-cutting solidarieis and energies. 

The chapter introduces the section ‘Posthuman Feminist Aesthetics’ of the edited volume Transformative Feminisms. The section focuses on contemporary art practices, which are in conversation with posthuman or more-than-human feminisms, and includes three essays that foreground discussions of art that trace feminist glitches and voice more-than-human perspectives. The introductory chapter defines posthuman feminist aesthetics and presents the three essays and the artists and artworks that they analyse. It is emphasized how a common denominator for the artists presented in the section’s three texts is their developing of art practices that challenge, deconstruct, and displace the image of the sovereign and exceptional human subject, Universal Man, which modernity, together with Christian heteropatriarchality, and racial and colonial capitalism, has constructed as the superior measure of everything, including aesthetic and ethical values. Moreover, it is discussed how the artists and artworks addressed in the section, reflect what has been called the “posthuman turn.”

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the issue of assisted dying and the struggle for its decriminalisation in a protestant European welfare state like Denmark, depicting this struggle as death activism (MacCormack, this volume and 2025). I focus on the Danish debates and the Christian paternalism that works against legalisation, while also reframing the question to suggest an ethics of vibrant death as an alternative to the dominant Christian paternalistic ethical framework that motivates criminalisation. The ethics of vibrant death is defined within the immanence philosophical, vitalist, and spiritually materialist framework that I have developed in earlier research and briefly summarise here. The entry point to the chapter’s discussion is twofold: 1) an autophenomenographic analysis of the experience of my beloved life partner’s cancer death some years ago, when she considered the possibility of assisted dying, and 2) an interview with retired Danish medical doctor Svend Lings, who is an active spokesperson for the legalisation of physician-assisted suicide in Denmark, and is prepared to enact civil disobedience to help patients asking for medical assistance to commit suicide. The chapter is ultimately an argument for death activism as a way of breaking down the taboos around death and preparations for death that govern modern imaginaries.

The aim of the chapter is to establish a conversation between phenomenology, feminist new materialism, and critical posthumanist thought, and, through an autophenomenographic study of death, mourning and continuing bonds, to investigate if and how these approaches can be mutually enriching. A key to the chapter’s reflections upon death, mourning and continuing bonds is the figuration of the mourning “I”, presented with reference to the author’s earlier research and mixed-genre writing that combine philosophical and poetic knowledge shaping. After an elaborate introduction of the theoretical and methodological framework, a cartography of the figuration of the mourning “I” is laid out through a distinction between three different modes of mourning: molar, molecular and spectral mourning. In line with the autophenomenographic and poetic methodology, these dimensions of mourning are presented through three autobiographical and poetic vignettes. These vignettes lead the way into the philosophical argument, and into a spelling out of the ways in which phemenological analysis can be put fruitfully in dialogue with posthumanist thought, immanence philosophy and feminist new materialism. As part of the chapter’s discussion of a posthuman phenomenology of mourning, it also compares notes with other phenomenological studies of death, mourning and continuing bonds. 

The chapter explores middling as an embodied, situated methodology for analysing friction in intersectional, trans, anti-racist, feminist politics and activism. It asks if middling together with intersectional, affect-theoretical and new materialist perspectives, and grounding in an ethics of unease, can foster alternative understandings of stalemated conflicts in social and environmental justice movements. Working from a linguistic definition of middle voice as a verbform which articulates reciprocicality (negative or positive), and resonates with a Spinozist affect-theoretical understanding of bodies affecting and being affected by each other, the chapter focuses on two frictional issues: transgender and race. Two cases are scrutinized. One addresses the upsurge of hostility between some radical feminist groups and parts of the trans movement; the other centres on a US media debate on the question whether or not the concepts, transgender and transracial, can be legitimately analogized. The cases are analysed from three perspectives: how mutually exclusive corpo-affectively invested onto-epistemologies produce friction; how an ethics of unease can perhaps lead to more in-depth, but still corpo-affectively situated, understandings of friction; and how a postconstructionist approach, which carefully addresses the intra-action of discourse and matter, can contribute to a rethinking of friction in combined intersectional and new materialist perspectives.

This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalised writing into an academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous-centred, feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalising of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning.

The chapter maps out key genealogies and current contributions to feminist theorizing and analysis of the more-than-human, which make up a significant and proliferating body of work in postdisciplinary feminist scholarship and Gender Studies today. It is discussed how the more-than-human is becoming a feminist concern in resonance with the intensifying global ecological crises, and growing decolonial protests against destruction of ecosystems and indigenous lands through colonial and capitalist extractivism. A main argument of the chapter is that the network of intersecting power differentials, addressed and criticized by feminist theory and politics, must include axes of power between the human and the other-than-human world. It is also underlined that the field of more-than-human feminisms is characterized by starting points in feminist theories and onto-epistemologies rather than in the study of “gender” as a common object. Another shared characteristics, foregrounded in the chapter, is a bio- and geoegalitarian approach that challenges hierarchical ideas about human exceptionalism. As the field of more-than-human feminisms is broad, plural and diverse, the chapter focuses on snapshots of currently unfolding theoretical debates without pretending to cover all aspects. The chapter starts from a brief genealogy and, secondly, puts focus on the question of methodologies: how to do research with more-than-humans, while breaking with the instrumentalizing gaze of conventional positivist science? Two projects – one on participatory posthuman research, and one on arts-based research are foregrounded. Thirdly, the chapter discusses relations between decolonial and posthumanist/new-materialist feminist approaches to the more-than-human through examples from three further research projects. Fourthly, the chapter focuses on feminist contributions to critical discussions if the currently much debated concept of the Anthropocene, the so-called “Age of Man”, and the search for alternatives to it, which are more appropriate in terms of challenging human exceptionalism.

The chapter gives an introduction to feminist epistemologies and the links between epistemology and ontology. It gives an overview of feminist empiricism, feminist standpoint theory, postmodern feminism and feminist new materialism, and digs more deeply into  feminist corpomaterialism, understood as a trend within feminist new materalism. The chapter is part of a textbook, and ends with questions to be used in a classroom setting. 

The chapter explores convergences between art/poetry, research, science, philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and activism in poetic posthumanities. Poetic posthumanities is defined as a framework for reflections upon a growing interest in hybrids of artistic/poetic and scholarly research, unfurling in the artworld and in Academia. These are hybrids which resist neoliberal instrumentalization of research in hyper-utilitarian contexts, and nostalgic attempts to keep up disciplinary borders of classic 20th century humanities. Poetic posthumanities’ interest in hybrids of artistic and scholarly work is discussed with a focus on knowing practices that seek poetic truthfulness and open for creative speculations about alternative political figurations of environmental and social justice-to-come. Furthermore, poetic posthumanities are presented as multiple and decentered, postdisciplinary efforts, indebted to a genealogy of ’studies’ which have developed as alternatives to conventional humanities and social science disciplines. The chapter uses a vignette approach, digging into three examples of contemporary art/research projects, which share a critical posthumanist engagement in undoing of human exceptionalism and making space for the unfolding of transformatory relationships to the more-than-human world and the planet body. The analysis reflects upon the examples as a cartography-in-flux that thematizes convergences, promises, energies, vibrancies and intensities, interpellated by the term, poetic posthumanities.