Black Queer and Trans Anthropocenes

Abstract

This dissertation names a conceptual framework that reads black queer and trans aesthetics, politics, and modes of affiliation for their contributions to ecological inquiry and Anthropocene criticism. Through an analysis of Michelle Cliff’s diasporic novels, Marlon Riggs’s AIDS media, Tourmaline’s transgender avant-garde cinema, and Alexis Pauline Gumb’s experimental poetry, I track how specific aspects of planetary climate change develop out of the longue durée of slavery and coloniality; while at the same time, I examine new onto-epistemological ruptures that are brought on by the sheer scope and magnitude of our contemporary crises since the 1970s. These emergent ruptures call into question familiar understandings of agency, reproduction, and home—to name but a few of the topics explored herein—in ways that reframe these concepts as something at the very threshold of visual or discursive intelligibility in diminishing worlds on the precipice of death. I read such moments as attempts to make sense of ecological destruction and environmental transformation so as to protect life and articulate something for the future wellbeing of the planet and all of its inhabitants. Moreover, by bringing black ecological inquiry on the intersections between humanity, animality, and property to bear on queer ecofeminism, I show how these critical fields help us to assess a central paradox at the heart of Western environmental philosophy. That is, while Black people have historically been fabricated as nonhuman nature and renewable resources in the contexts of slavery, people deemed sexually deviant or gender non-conforming have historically been misconstrued as “unnatural” or “against nature.” Excavating this conceptual intersection in my primary texts and critical sources, I locate alternative ways of being and becoming human and find different methods for environmental stewardship or ecological interdependence that are not beholden to the logics of capitalist regulation, extraction, or disposability. As such, I argue that black queer and transgender histories, aesthetic practices, and lived experiences are essential to any accounts of social and environmental justice.