Queer Resilience and Climate Catastrophe in Black Wave

Queer Resilience and Climate Catastrophe in Black Wave Cynthia Belmont (bio) Let’s get a bit playful. Timothy Morton, “What Is Dark Ecology?” In Michelle Tea’s 2016 metafictional queercore autobiographical novel Black Wave, the queer punk community of late-1990s San Francisco faces the end of the world as environmental collapse due to climate change accelerates. The protagonist, femme writer Michelle, moves to Los Angeles, hoping to leave addiction behind and renew her commitment to writing her memoir while waiting for a cataclysmic tsunami to hit California. As a dystopian historical work that immortalizes and problematizes a queer golden age without a future, Black Wave unhinges the inherent structure of the apocalyptic idea, in that cataclysm is conceived not as a rupture—not as a dualistic scenario contrasting a functional, nostalgic, or civilized “before” with a dysfunctional, terrifying, or primitive “after”—but rather as an inevitable extension of an already environmentally, institutionally, and culturally broken world in which most animals are extinct, people suffer Compound Environmental Malaise, and Michelle occupies an intensely marginalized and creative social location in the precarity of the queer punk ghetto. I argue, from a queer ecological and ecofeminist perspective, that this novel offers an inspiring vision of queer resilience in the context of climate change, a vision based in a dark ecological, “transnatural” embrace of waste and irony, empathy for marginalized Others, and a punk iteration of “queer time.” While “for those oriented toward the status quo, uncertainty and instability of existing structures and processes is [End Page 1] concerning,”1 Black Wave illustrates that, for those already living at the margins/in the ruins, uncertainty and instability are the status quo since they lack the social and material benefits of those structures—hence their potential for dark ecological resilience in the face of apocalypse. In dark ecology, recognition of the precarity of life in the Anthropocene means rejecting the romantic association of “nature” (as separate from humans) with purity, origin, and refuge and acknowledging the “monstrous” entanglement of all things, including with danger, contamination, damage, and death.2 Despite its epistemological location within “a time of planetary catastrophe,”3 a dark ecological sensibility is not a grim, dismal one but is rather imbued with “dark sweetness” and even with humor.4 Black Wave’s exploration of queer ecological “subjectivity in waste”5 generates a dark sweetness of flourishing versus fear within environmental unpredictability and risk—of resilience as “ongoingness” versus the conventional “bouncing back.”6 In contrast to a privileged approach to resilience, wherein “bouncing back” represents an investment in the status quo that does not resonate for marginalized communities that have suffered within historical systems and structures,7 Haraway’s concept of “ongoingness” means finding powerfully creative means of coexistence within ecological uncertainty8—a practice that “requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures,” but as embedment in “myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”9 Ongoingness may then resist destructive notions of progress, presenting “a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital.”10 This fierce reply echoes the “forceful . . . and undeniable” “queer temporality,” or “persistent present,” that theorists have identified at work in queer culture.11 According to Halberstam, radical temporalities such as queer time define how “all kinds of people . . . will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production,” including “sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers . . . the unemployed,”12 and queer subcultures, which diverge from normative constructions of futurity and expectations for maturity and success (marriage, child bearing, etc.).13 The queer punk subculture, in particular, offers ontological challenges to customary conceptualizations of time, growth, change, and meaningful action,14 potentially destabilizing the norms that depend on these concepts.15 Illustrating an apocalyptic ongoingness based [End Page 2] in the radical flexibility of queer time, Black Wave exemplifies queer resilience in its protagonist Michelle’s ability to creatively persist and imagine a life of value and integrity despite environmental upheaval and social marginality, contrary to the requirements of hegemonic institutions and norms and in line with Tsing

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