Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies

Nina Lykke, Tara Mehrabi, Marietta Radomska

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040441558
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

This Handbook aims to provide a comprehensive, international cartography of Queer Death Studies, offering broad, in-depth insights into the field and its emergence through tentacular transdisciplinary networking. Taking research and art-making on death, dying, mourning, and afterlife into new directions, it explores the multiple effects of contemporary necropolitics and the proliferation of death-worlds during the current period of Earth's history, 'The Anthropocene' or 'the Age of Man'.

Informed by queer, critical posthumanist, decolonial, and feminist approaches, the Handbook presents a unique variety of both critical and affirmative reflections upon the world's intersecting necropowers, and ethico-political potentials for social and environmental change. Contributors speculate on ways to reimagine life/ death-relations as vibrant entanglements. They also investigate modes of mourning differently, resisting necropolitical regimes that deem human and non-human individuals and populations to be disposable and non-grievable when they differ too much from the normative modern subject, Universal Man, in terms of intersections of gender, racialisation, class, sexuality, embodiment, embrainment, geopolitical positioning, or species.

A thought provoking read, this Handbook is intended for broad global audiences of researchers, artists, teachers, students, death-professionals, (health)careworkers, activists, and NGOs interested in tools to rethink and reimagine death, dying, mourning, and afterlife from intersections of queering, decolonising, posthumanising, and feminist perspectives.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Credits
• Reprinted Chapters and Permissions
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Queer Death Studies: In Times of Anthropocene Necropolitics and the Search for New Ethico-Political Imaginations1
• Part I Rethinking Life/Death Ecologies and Temporalities: Introduction
• 2 Extinction and the Deep Time of Death
• 3 Deterritorialising Death: Queerfeminist Biophilosophy and Ecologies of the Non/Living in Contemporary Art
• 4 Life/Death Ecologies and Temporalities of Bioart: A Conversation
• 5 Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens
• 6 Dis(re)membering Death in Eco-horror Forests
• 7 The Time of Hybrid Corals: Laboratory Experiments in Extinction and Survival
• 8 Extinction Companion Species: Bare Death, Response-(in)ability, and Human/Non-human Dis/connections1
• 9 Posthuman Genetic Legacies: Queering Fertility and (Im)mortality through Biological Arts Practice
• Part II Anthropocene Necropolitics and Extinction: Introduction
• 10 The Necropolitics of Care: And How to Dismantle the Master’s House
• 11 Killable Bodies and Necro-Value in Times of COVID: An Ethnography of Death in Iran through a Feminist-Queer Lens
• 12 Metamorphic Necropolitics: Deadly Othering in European East–West Power Relations
• 13 Affective Necropolitics: The Promise of Protection and its Deadly Ends
• 14 ‘A Gentle Touch’: Imaginaries for Killing Fish Humanely on Social Media
• 15 Making Death on a Molecular Scale: Transgenic Mosquitoes, More-Than-Human Biopolitics, and the Emergence of Necrovalue
• 16 The Making and Burning of Borders – on Historicity, Storytelling, and Forensic Methods: A Conversation
• 17 Ecocide, Ecological Grief, and the Power of Telling Stories: A Conversation
• 18 Alt-right Memes and Microspectropolitics: Posthumanising and Queering Schild & Vrienden’s Memetic Activism1
• 19 Against Abstractions: On Geopolitics, Humanness, Virus, and Death
• 20 Frames of Palestinian Childhood and the End of Man
• Part III Caring Death Activism: Introduction
• 21 Death Activism and the Living World1
• 22 Queer Ecologies of Death at my Desk: Sinking into the Toxic Legacy of Artistic and Academic Practice
• 23 Dying All the Time: Violent Ecologies at the End of Life
• 24 Saving Queer and Trans People from ‘Bad’ Deaths: Suicide Prevention as ‘Cruel Optimism’ in Suicidist Contexts1
• 25 A Beautiful Passing: The Story of my Mother’s Euthanasia
• 26 A Good Day to Die?: On Assisted Suicide and Vibrant Dying
• 27 ‘A Life Cut Short’: US-American Death Doulas, Life Expectancy, and Queering the Future
• PART IV Aesthetics and Mediated Imaginaries of Death: Introduction
• 28 For a Queer Topography of Female Necrophilia: The Neon-Gothic Aesthetics
• 29 The Trans-Death Continuum
• 30 Queerness, Contagion, Noise: The Death of the (Sexual-Sonic) Subject Constitutes a Queer Noise Moment
• 31 Queering Death, Desire, and Intimacy: The Cinematic Ecology in Lou Ye’s Spring Fever
• 32 Affective Mapping of David Wojnarowicz’s Selected Works
• 33 Necro-Art: Material (After)Life
• 34 The Ambivalence of Exposure: Splicing Time in Tom Bianchi’s Fire Island Pines Polaroids
• 35 Queer Complicity, Queer Instauration, and Digital (Im)mortality: Or How to Think About Mourning and Our Cyberselves
• 36 Queering the Transhumanist Imaginaries of Life after Death: A Deconstructionist Approach to Cryonics and Mind-Uploading
• Part V Politics and Ethics of Grieving Practices and Remembrance: Introduction
• 37 Between Silence and Silencing, Stories Are Told: Documentary Narratives on Queer Elders and the Re-Writing of History
• 38 Living with the Dead: Grief Politics and Discourses on Nationalism and Modernity in Georgia
• 39 Gender Affirming or Disenfranchised Grief?: Considering Death Rights in Aotearoa New Zealand
• 40 Remaking Death at the Beginning of Life: Living with Technological Decisions
• 41 From Baquiné to the Streets: Performances of Grief
• 42 Caring to Keep One’s Impressions Alive
• 43 Beyond Transgression: Sexuality, Death and the ‘Human’ in a Post-Shoah Memorial
• 44 Queer Grief: From a Public Feeling to Private Grieving
• 45 Permeable Membranes and Prosthetic Fluids: Narrating my Father’s Death*
• Part VI Co-becoming with the Dead and Spectral Mourning: Introduction
• 46 The Bedana1 and the Wanderer
• 47 Obuntu Bulamu: A Decolonial African Feminist Reconceptualisation of Death and Mourning1
• 48 Griefly Related: Continuing Friendship After Death
• 49 Being, Entangled, and Re‘turn’ed in Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back: Carl’s Book
• 50 Betty (or Libby), Kitty, and Cookie: The (De)Queering of Elizabeth Short, Catherine Genovese, and Sylvia Likens
• 51 Archival Activism and Necropolitics in the YouTube Series Queer Ghost Hunters
• 52 Dust, Documentation, and The Book of the Dead
• 53 Posthuman Touch and Mourning within the Realm of the Performative: Narratives of Queer, More-Than-Human, and Revolutionary Ghosts
• 54 The Haunting Return of the Mutant Zombie Mink: On Ghost Story Writing as Poetics, Ethics and Method
• 55 Decolonising Mourning: World-Making with the Selk’nam People of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego
• Part VII Imagining Life/Death Entanglements Differently: Introduction
• 56 Re/orienting to Death
• 57 Eurydice in the Underworld
• 58 Queer Reading, Queer Dying
• 59 Decomposing Wood: Instructions for Survival in the Scraps of Ruin and Collapse
• 60 mythographies of decomposition
• 61 Death and Distributed Minds: Creative Speculations on Extended Spider Cognition
• 62 Passing Strange: The Queer Dimensions of Pandemic Death
• 63 What If Every Critter’s Death Was Vibrant?: Figuring Ethics Between Ecologies of Gifting and Extinction
• Contributors
• Index