Anti-)Apocalypse and (Kill-)Joy

The following conversation took place on February 16, 2024, as part of the annual OUTsider festival and conference in Austin, Texas. OUTsider is an LGBTQ+ transmedia arts organization instigated by Curran Nault in 2013 as a public-facing extension of their research on queer punk subculture: as a means to maintain the radical, DIT (do-it-together), scrappy spirit of previous queer-as-punk gatherings, like Homo-A-Gogo (2002 – 9).These OUTsider efforts include Conference on the Couch (CoTC): a series of salon-style panel discussions that occur alongside the festival proper. CoTC puts academics and artists in conversation about topics of the day and takes place on the actual couch in Nault's living room — with coffee, breakfast bites, and fifty or more attendees crowded on, and around, the titular soft grey sofa. This “(anti-)apocalyptic” conversation was prompted by, and took place in the context of, an accumulation of 2020s “catastrophes”: the COVID-19 pandemic, the rise in anti-Black and anti-migrant violence, the genocide in Palestine, as well as the numerous environmental disasters and endured experiences of economic precarity and mental/physical exhaustion. This conversation has been edited to remove digressions and is slightly reordered to maintain clarity and coherence

CLARITY · Context (archaeology · Conversation · Happening · Precarity · Queer · The arts · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Music History and Culture · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism