Queer Futures for an Aging Planet
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375342 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jacob Jewusiak (Newcastle University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1-2 |
| Pages | 157-179 |
| Publication date | 2023-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/03335372-10342141 |
| OpenAlex | W4379779637 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
Associated with disaster metaphors such as floods, avalanches, tsunamis, and icebergs, older people have come to take the symbolic form of the environmental impacts they are imagined causing. Yet even as older people are posited as the cause and imaginatively take the shape of the disaster, they are also registered as especially vulnerable to the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather. While the tendency toward blame and care are not logically incompatible, this tension has resulted in a cultural narrative that fuels a deep sense of unfairness across generations. This article reads the sterility dystopia-a subgenre of science fiction where a global inability to have children results in aging populations and societal collapse-as registering the anxiety that arises at the intersection of age and the environment. Taking The Children of Men as a case study, I suggest that P. D. James's novel expresses the demographic dread arising from the relative shift in younger and older populations-not of a world lacking children, as we might expect, but of one catastrophized by the overabundance of the old and aging. Pushing against the link between climate activism and generational futurity, I draw on queer theory to argue that intergenerational kinship in the present privileges the values of affiliation, contingency, and immediacy that can inspire a more sustainable future
Aesthetics · Dystopia · Epistemology · Immediacy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Queer · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · History · Psychology · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
Why Worry About Future Generations?
Imagining Extinction
Queer Ecologies
Metamorphoses of Science Fiction
The Great Derangement
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
‘But the real problem is….’
The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism
Strange Natures
Worlds Without Us
Demodystopias
Intimate Atmospheres
In a Queer Time and Place
The Posthuman Comedy
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |