No Failure: Climate Change,

Radical Hope, and Queer Crip

Feminist Eco-Futures

Kim Q. Hall

Abstract: This paper offers a critique of the emphasis on

anti-futurity and failure prevalent in contemporary queer
theory. I argue that responsibility for climate change requires
commitments to futures that are queer, crip, and feminist. A queer
crip feminist commitment to the future is, I contend, informed by
radical hope.

T
he theme of the 2012 tenth biennial Radical Philosophy Association
conference and the thirtieth anniversary of the Radical Philosophy
Association was What Is Radical Philosophy Today? In this paper I
consider what it might mean to think radically about queerness today. A turn
to contemporary queer theory for some insight reveals much discussion of
crisis, materialism, futurity, and failure,1 discussions that offer important

1. Examples of recent engagements with failure and/or futurity include Jos

Muoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York:
New York University Press, 2009); Christina Crosby, Lisa Duggan, Roderick
Ferguson, Kevin Floyd, Miranda Joseph, Heather Love, Robert McRuer, Fred
Moten, Tavia Nyongo, Lisa Rofel, Jordana Rosenberg, Gayle Salamon, Dean
Spade, and Amy Villarejo, Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis: A Roundtable
Discussion, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18.1 (2012): 12747;
Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2011); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Robert McRuer, Crip Theory:
Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University
Press, 2006); Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalisms in Queer
Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 200)7); Jasbir Puar, Coda: The
Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, and Switchpoints, GLQ: A Journal of
Radical Philosophy Review Volume 17, number 1 (2014): 203225
DOI: 10.5840/radphilrev201432614
204 Kim Q. Hall

critiques of concepts of the future that fail to resist homonationalism, global

capitalism, racism, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. At stake in this tem-
poral turn2 in queer studies is the relevance of queer critique, the meaning
of queerness, and the possibility of the emergence of other, more livable
worlds. For example, Jos Muoz begins Cruising Utopia: The Then and There
of Queer Futurity with a definition of queerness as that which is oriented to-
ward the future, the not-yet, and the creative imagining and emergence of
alternative ways of living and being in the world. He writes, Queerness is a
performative because it is not simply a being but a doing toward the future.
Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insis-
tence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.3 Such queer
critical conceptions of futurity are vital and have usefully demonstrated the
pitfalls of temporalities that assume and reproduce white, class privileged
conceptions of queerness and homonationalist complicity with neoliberal
global capitalism in their failure to consider how even marginalized identi-
ties and resistance movements can be incorporated into the very systems of
power they wish to critique.4 Similarly, Robert McRuer points to how queer
and disability liberalism risk becoming another site of consumption, ren-
dering ordinary and thus ineffective the transformative, critical potential of
both queerness and disability.5 As McRuer point out, the radical meaning of
queer and crip6 lies in their persistent critique of normalization and their
desire for a different, more just world. It is this desire for the not-yet that
characterizes, at least in part, queer and crip temporalities.
These discussions of futurity in queer and disability studies are ex-
tremely important and generative; nonetheless, I wonder if they have gone
far enough. Despite their emphasis on failure, materialism, and futurity,
Lesbian and Gay Studies 18.1 (2012): 14958; and Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer
Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
2. Gayle Salamons contribution to Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis
characterizes discussions of futurity as part of the temporal turn in queer studies.
3. Muoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. As I was completing this paper, Jos Muoz died. My
thinking owes much to his work on queerness, race, and futurity.
4. Ibid., 2021.
5. McRuer, Crip Theory, 19496.
6. In Queering the Crip or Cripping the Queer: Intersections of Queer and Crip
Identities in Solo Autobiographical Performance, GLQ: A Journal of Gay and
Lesbian Studies 9.12 (2003): 2556, Carrie Sandahl introduced crip as a
critical concept and position within disability studies in order to name and
reflect on similarities and differences between crip and queer. Both queer and
crip critique norms, normalcy, and identity. See also Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip,
15, and McRuer, Crip Theory, 35, for more about how crip theory maintains a
critical stance in relation to identity politics within disability studies while
respecting the important role identity has played and continues to play within
disability movements.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 205

there has been (with a few notable exceptions)7 a striking silence concern-
ing the planet with which queer crip feminist critique and identities are
intertwined. My point here is not to insist on a simple addition of anoth-
er context for discussion; my point is that the absence of consideration of
planetary implications is particularly puzzling given the contemporary mo-
ment in which ideas of the future and failure are so central to discourses of
sustainability and climate change. Most discussions about futurity in queer
studies rightly focus on the social, political, and economic crisis of neoliberal
global capitalism; however, critical attention to this crisis fails for the most
part to extend concern to what is arguably one of the most urgent, very ma-
terial, crises in our world, a crisis fueled by neoliberal global capitalist de-
velopment: climate change. In this paper I seek to address this omission by
advancing a queer crip feminist8 critical engagement with the emphasis on
failure and futurity in queer studies today.
Building on Rosi Braidottis concept of becoming-earth,9 I argue that,
when radically understood, queerness and disability are sites of imaginative
alternatives crucial for responding to (i.e., being critically attuned toward
and accountable to) climate change. I argue for a queer crip feminist con-
ception of and orientation to the future informed by critique of assump-
tions regarding and implications of boundaries between the human and

7. For interesting perspectives on the entanglement of queerness, gender,

race, disability, and the non-/other than/more than human world, see Kafer,
Feminist Queer Crip; Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and
Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Eli Clare, Exile and
Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation (Cambridge, MA: South End Press,
1999); Stacy Alaimo, Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material
Self (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); and Queer Ecologies: Sex,
Nature, Politics, Desire, ed. Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). My thinking in this paper is
indebted to their important work.
8. Throughout I describe my approach as queer crip feminist in order to (1) draw
attention to how these areas of theoretical and activist work are inseparable
in my own thinking about bodies, identities, materiality, ethics, justice,
and normalization and (2) highlight existing and potential transformative
interrelationships between questions, concepts, and analyses in queer,
disability, and feminist studies. For more about the generative interrelationship
between these fields, see Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, which demonstrates how
thinking at the intersections of these critical approaches contributes to the
development of a new critical position (feminist queer crip) that is attuned
to the exclusions and normalizing moments within each of the three fields. In
this paper, while I obviously draw from feminist, queer, and disability studies
analyses, my main focus is on contemporary discussions of futurity and failure
in queer studies.
9. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 8189.
206 Kim Q. Hall

non-human. Many discussions of futurity within queer studies have failed

to take into account the naturecultural10 beings we are. Building on the title
of Clare Colebrooks edited series for Open Humanities Press press, Braid-
otti contends the Age of the Anthropocene11 calls for a critical climate
change, a shift in how we conceptualize being, life, death, and temporali-
ty.12 Ultimately, I aim to show that far from kids stuff13 or merely a site for
alternative social alliances, a more-than-human understanding of the future
is vital for queer crip feminist lives and offers the conceptual resources nec-
essary for bringing about another, more just world.
As critiques of queer theorys whiteness have shown,14 counter-hege-
monic orientations are not innate in the concept of queerness itself; instead,
the resistant potential of queerness is contingent upon how the concept is
deployed and in which contexts. One major context that needs to be con-
sidered in queer discussions of futurity is the more-than-human planetary
context. As the contributors to Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire
demonstrate, there has been a justified suspicion of appeals to nature and
the natural within queer theory (as well as in feminist and disability stud-
ies) because of the longstanding role of those appeals in the pathologization
of non-normative bodyminds,15 identities, and lives. It is indeed important
to retain a critical suspicion of appeals to nature. Nonetheless, when cou-
pled with an inattentiveness to our naturecultural being in the world, such
suspicion fails to critically address assumptions about what it means to be
human that have also played a role in pathologizing identities, bodyminds,
and lives that exceed gendered, racialized, and able-bodied norms. In other
words, the failure to attend to the implications of queer conceptions of fu-
turity and sustainability for the planet reflects and reinforces a conception

10. Donna Harraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and
Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003). See also Stacy
Alaimo, Eluding Capture: The Science, Culture, and Pleasure of Queer
Animals, in Queer Ecologies, ed. Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson, 5171.
11. In light of the fact that most climate change is anthropogenic, many have
declared our current geological era to be the Anthropocene, a name that
reflects the fact that our current geological age is marked by unprecedented
human transformations of Earth systems.
12. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 81.
13. Edelman, No Future.
14. See Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color
Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
15. Here I invoke Margaret Prices concept of bodymind in Mad at School:
Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2011), a concept that challenges and proposes an alternative
to Cartesian assumptions of mind body dualism and the frequent silence about
mental disabilities in disability studies.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 207

of queerness that undermines desires for transnational alliances and livable

worlds. A commitment to transnational alliances and livable worlds must
address practices (for instance, emissions produced by the consumption
habits of global elites) that disproportionately threaten the present and fu-
ture lives of those who are least privileged in the world. Too often, appeals
to a livable world in queer theory ignore the planet on which hopes, dreams,
relationshipsin short, our livestake place. When calls for a more livable
future and world are made, which entities futures do queer theorists tend
to have in mind? In this paper I aim to show that radical thinking about the
meaning of the future and more livable, sustainable worlds must strive to
take into account and be accountable to the planet with which human lives
and life in general is enmeshed.
My discussion of these issues begins with a critical consideration of the
association of queerness with anti-futurity, followed by a discussion of the
idea of queerness as failure. Then, I consider the view that intersectionality
forecloses the future. Next, I turn to a discussion of ice in order to provide
an example alternative conception of the future that resists queer anthropo-
centrisms and is responsive to the reality of climate change. Finally, I make
a case for a queer crip feminism informed by radical hope for alternative
futures. It is radical hope for alternative, more-than-human futures that can
sustain queer crip feminist lives.

The FutureIts Not Just For Kids

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive Lee Edelman proclaims that
a future-oriented politics informed by a positive, hopeful conception of the
future is necessarily opposed to and exclusionary of queerness. The future,
according to Edelman, is kids stuff,16 that which is always anticipated in
the name of the Child who embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to
claim full rights to its future share in the nations good, though always at
the cost of limiting the rights real citizens are allowed.17 In the name of
this longed-for Child of the future, specifically in order to protect and pro-
mote the freedom of the imagined Child to come, the freedom of currently-
existing people is curtailed.18 Edelmans contention is that present politics is
oriented toward the good of the Child (or future generations) and that this
future orientation of the political is the means by which heteronormative
society defines and understands itself as good.
In the context of this reproductive futurity, that which is queer can
have no place because queerness disrupts efforts to secure the stability and
longevity of the heteronormative family and societys continuing existence

16. Edelman, No Future, 1.

17. Ibid., 11.
18. Ibid.
208 Kim Q. Hall

and identity in the figure of the Child. It is this desire for stability and pres-
ervation of the same in the future that Edelman rightly identifies as anti-
thetical to the instability reflected in queers emphasis on becoming rather
than being or fixed identity. Edelman defines queerness as that which can
never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one.19 Thus defined, queer-
ness defies the notion that it is possible or even good to reproduce oneself
and ones society, that the future is a site for the reproduction of the present.
As Edelman points out, the effect of invoking the Child in political discourse
offers assurance that society as it is currently structured will continue to ex-
ist in perpetuity. This insistence on sameness is, Edelman points out, cen-
tral to heteronormative (and I would add able-bodyminded) conceptions of
the future.20
Following Edelmans argument, queer theory must, in order to maintain
its radical edge, reject the future, a concept inextricably caught up in a repro-
ductive logic. In its refusal of identity, queerness cannot be assimilated into
the heteronormative reproductive futurity that is central to the continuance
of the identity of the social order into the future.21 Queer, in other words,
names that which negates the future.22 Queerness refuses the promise of
futurity, the promise of a future that will both resemble and be better than
the present.23 The future, Edelman proclaims, has and is no place for queers.
Edelmans thinking on this topic can be extended to thinking about
disability and the future. After all, while normalizing stories proclaim that
things will get better,24 that the future will be brighter, there are no queers
or crips in that brighter, better future; dominant conceptions of the future
posit the future as a promise only for the able-bodied, hetero- and homo-
normative.25 As Alison Kafer explains, a compulsorily able-bodied society
perceives disabled people as having no future and the future as devoid of
disability. She writes, If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending
tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid.
... In this framework, a future with disability is a future no one wants, and
the figure of the disabled person, especially the disabled fetus or child, be-
comes the symbol of the undesired future.26

19. Ibid., 17.

20. Ibid., 21.
21. Ibid., 2425.
22. Ibid., 26.
23. Ibid., 27.
24. See Dan Savage and Terry Miller, It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming
Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living (New York: Penguin, 2011).
25. For queer and/or disability studies critiques of this progressive notion of the
future see McRuer, Crip Theory; Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip; and Puar, Coda.
26. Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 23.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 209

Edelman recommends a queer politics of resistance and refusal of all

forms of enslavement in the name of having a life,27 and his association of
queerness with a rejection and refusal of the future has become very influ-
ential in queer studies. However, some queer theorists28 have argued that
Edelmans universalizing concept of the Child is a concept that ignores the
racialized, classed, gendered, and able-bodied networks that work to elimi-
nate the future for poor people, people of color, and able-bodied people in
the world. To be construed as having a life not worth living (i.e., as having a
life unworthy of being continued into the future) means that one is not tak-
en into account when plans for the future are made. For example, as Michael
Berub and Nancy Tuana contend, whether or not one survived Hurricane
Katrina was not simply the result of living below or above sea level; it was
also about being taken into account in the citys planning for the future, be-
ing thought of as someone to consider in light of possible disasters.29
While critical of ableist conceptions of the future and sympathetic to
Edelmans rejection of the future as irredeemably heteronormative, Kafer
disagrees with Edelmans conclusion that queerness is necessarily a posi-
tion against the future. Kafer rejects Edelmans universalizing notion of the
Child as incompatible with a queer and crip futurity and defends a feminist
queer crip conception of the future. Along with Jos Muoz and Jasbir Puar,
Kafer points out that only privileged children in the world have been al-
lowed futures. Puar writes,
For queer politics, the challenge is not so much to refuse a future through
the repudiation of reproductive futurity, ... but to understand how the
biopolitics of regenerative capacity already demarcate racialized and sexu-
alized statistical population aggregates as those in decay, destined for no
future, based not upon whether they can or cannot reproduce children but
on what capacities they can an cannot regenerate and what kinds of assem-
blages they compel, repel, spur, deflate.30
For Kafer, Muoz, and Puar, it is incumbent upon queer, feminist, and/or dis-
ability theorists to reimagine, not reject, the future. Such reimaginings are
queer crip feminist to the extent that they understand the future as open and
reflective of boundaries demarcating identities and entities in the present.
In his discussion of the future, Robert McRuer maintains the necessity
of queer and crip critique of incorporations of difference that are part of

27. Edelman, No Future, 30.

28. For example, see Muoz, Cruising Utopia, and Puar, Terrorist Assemblages.
29. See Michael Berub, Disability and Disasters, http://www.michaelberube
.com/index.php/weblog/2005/09 (accessed December 2, 2013); also Nancy
Tuana, Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina, in Material Feminisms, ed.
Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2008), 20708.
30. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 211.
210 Kim Q. Hall

neoliberal visions of the future.31 Like Kafer and Puar, McRuer does not ar-
gue for a wholesale repudiation of the future; in fact, the possibility of queer
crip futures informs his critique of neoliberalism.32 For McRuer, while repro-
ductive futurity is unsustainable, alternative sustainable futures are both
possible and necessary. He writes,
[W]e might note that a range of critiques of capital ... figure disability as
the sign of capitalism gone awry while also conjuring up a naturalized able-
bodiedness that should follow either its reform (for liberals) or eradica-
tion (for Marxists and other revolutionaries). Queer and crip reworkings
of Marxism might more effectively speak to each other across their shared
desire to not simply straighten that which is bent, and might thereby rec-
ognize the multiple locations where transnational crip/queer alliances
function as sites for imagining a necessarily disabled worldmeaning an
inhabitable [my emphasis], sustainable, livable world.33
McRuer calls for queer and crip futures that remain open to the disability
to come, an openness that renders other futures and other worlds more
accessible to the diversity of real bodies and counter-hegemonic, non-nor-
mative lives.34
What are the implications of such discussions of the future for under-
standing and grappling with the realities of climate change? I want to build
on McRuers and Puars respective calls for sustainability and posthuman-
ism and consider in more detail the meaning of queerness and disability in
relation to the nonhuman natural world. Queer crip feminist responsive-
ness to climate change requires more than understanding that the future
isnt only kids stuff; it requires, as Rosi Braidotti suggests, an understanding
that as naturecultural beings humans are both embodied and embedded.35
From this perspective, boundaries drawn between nature and culture, hu-
man and nonhuman, able-bodied and disabled, etc. are, as Nancy Tuana puts
it, viscous and porous,36 and identities, while embodied and located, are
changing not stable, interactively emergent not innate, and contingent and
provisional not eternal.
As Braidotti makes clear, an openness to the future for emergent, in-
teractive, naturecultural beings means an openness to the possibility of a
future without us, by which she means a future that does not merely repro-
duce the past, a future made possible by a reconception of subjectivity and
community.37 This conception of the future better reflects the naturecultural

31. McRuer, Crip Theory, 196.

32. Ibid. See also Crosby et al., Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis.
33. Crosby et al., Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis, 13132.
34. McRuer, Crip Theory, 198, 208.
35. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 66.
36. Tuana, Viscous Porosity.
37. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 83.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 211

beings we are and provides a more promising ground for queer crip femi-
nist responsiveness to climate change. It takes seriously the anthropogenic
nature of climate change and the fact that not all humans are equally re-
sponsible for climate change-related harms. It is crucial for the future to
be rethought in nonanthropocentric ways in queer, disability, and feminist
studies because only such a reconceived future will enable us to realize sus-
tainable futures. Discussions of the future must take climate change into
account because the present reality of climate change and the future climate
change to which past and present emissions have committed the planet, are
inextricably part of the context in which we are oriented toward the future.
To speak of the future without taking into account this context is to put for-
ward an empty concept of the future.
In the absence of taking into account the earth/planet with which our
lives are enmeshed, the concept of the future that informs queer theorys
temporal turn remains too anthropocentric to be responsive to climate
change. Similarly, in speaking about disability studies, Alison Kafer observes,
the pervasiveness of the social model in disability studies has prevented
it from grappling with the nonhuman environment/nature; as a result, she
contends, transformative coalitional possibilities between disability and
environmental movements remain largely untapped.38 Here, I extend Kaf-
ers insight to think about climate changethere is untapped potential not
only for coalitions between political movements but also for rethinking the
centrality of the often all-too-human subject at the heart of queer, crip, and
feminist studies. Before saying more about how a reconceptualized subject
and future at the heart of a queer crip feminist response to climate change,
I turn to another preoccupation in contemporary queer theory that begs
interrogation: thinking of queerness as failure.

Must Queers Always Fail?

While J. Jack Halberstam has critiqued the absence, in Edelman and others,
of any reflection on what a queer politics of no future might look like in the
world and how it might speak to the material lives of queers, he nonetheless
shares Edelmans critique of reproductive futurity. Halberstams critique
of the future emphasizes societys relentless optimism. In this context of
optimism, queerness, Halberstam argues, is that which is associated with
failure. By characterizing queerness as an art of failure, Halberstam sug-
gests it resists the nave optimism that squelches creativity and prevents
the development of genuinely counter-hegemonic alternatives.39 After all, in
the context of neoliberal capitalism, success is connected to reproductive

38. Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 129.

39. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.
212 Kim Q. Hall

maturity and wealth accumulation.40 Consequently, failures are peo-

ple who refuse those norms in favor of living life otherwise.41 Halberstam
writes, Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, umaking,
undoing, unbecoming, unlearning, not knowing may in fact offer more cre-
ative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world. Failing
is something queers do and have always done exceptionally well.42 In other
words, because queers do not conform to norms of identity, success, matu-
rity, or having a life, queers are failures, and our failure promises to open
new directions in queer theory, communities, and lives.
What can it mean to think radically about queerness when it is con-
ceived as a site of failure and no future? Things certainly seem, at first glance,
very bleak indeed. Edelman and Halberstam accurately portray how het-
eronormativity frames the concept of queerness. They also rightly critique
the homonationalism and homonormativity that dominate contemporary
neoliberal movements for LGBTQ rights in the U.S., a movement that seeks
recognition of LGBTQ normalcy. Nonetheless, Halberstams association of
optimism with a desire for normative happiness seems to make it impos-
sible for hope to be anything other than a rejection of queerness in favor
of normalcy and positive thinking. Hope, for Halberstam, is a response that
locks one into a reactionary politics that vacillates between cynical resig-
nation or nave optimism.43 Thus, Halberstams interest in the resistant
possibilities of failure reflects his interest in thinking after hope.44 One of
failures queer virtues, for Halberstam, is its challenge to the toxic positiv-
ity of contemporary life.45
If queer is by definition a failed identity with no future, is there any
non-nave way in which there could be hope for queers? Could this hope be
radical? I certainly appreciate Halberstams point and agree that queer has
been associated with failure to achieve heteronormative happiness and suc-
cess. Nonetheless, I am concerned that embracing failure leaves only a re-
actionary role for queer resistance. In other words, queer resistance, when
understood as failure, becomes a mere rejection of hope, which is under-
stood as only a heteronormative affect. Because this ultimately limited con-
ception of queer resistance does not reflect our naturecultural being in the
world, it is unable to address how modes of life and thinking among global
elites have contributed to a toxic environment for human and nonhuman
bodies and communities.

40. Ibid., 2.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 23.
43. Ibid., 1.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid., 3.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 213

In addition to efforts to conceive of queerness, gender, and disability in

ways that remain open to possible transnational alliances, a critically radi-
cal conception of queerness must also, to borrow from Rosi Braidotti, strike
... an alliance with the productive and immanent force of zo, or life in its
non-human aspects. This requires a mutation of our shared understanding
of what it means to think at all, let alone think critically.46 While I am wary
of Braidottis reference to a shared understanding,47 her claim presents a
provocative challenge to persistent anthropomorphisms in feminist, queer,
and disability studies.
Being radical, at least in part, is being critically aware of and accountable
to the historical, economic, social, and political contexts in which one lives. In
this sense, queer crip feminist critique is radical to the extent that it not only
understands identity as situated within and shaped by structures of power, but
also to the extent that it strives to be cognizant of its impact on those structures
of power. It is this radical conception of situatedness and contingency that Di-
ana Coole and Samantha Frost seem to have in mind when they characterize
new materialist critique as concerned not only with the material but also with
the immersion in the material, including the immersion in the material of
theorists and theories themselves.48 What would it mean for queer, feminist,
and disability studies to attend to the realities of climate change, for instance, in
their discussions of urban and rural environments, access, global capitalism, or
the future? In part, it seems that in order to take seriously its immersion in the
material, queer crip feminist critique must be informed by an awareness that
questioning of the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the
organic and the inorganic, is central, not merely additive, to its critical projects.

Intersectionality and the Future

While Puar also calls for an end to anthropomorphisms in queer and dis-
ability studies, her discussion remains focused on human precariousness
that results from the globalized medical industrial complex.49 For Puar,
moving away from anthropocentrisms toward a posthuman conception
of assemblage involves jettisoning intersectional frameworks for thinking
about differences of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, and nationality.
Puar contends that intersectional frameworks foreclose the future by em-
phasizing being rather than becoming. According to Puar, intersectionality
46. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 66.
47. After all, it is not clear that all human beings and communities, let alone all
philosophical traditions, have had either an anthropocentric conception of life
or a shared understanding of life in general.
48. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Introducing the New Materialisms, in
Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha
Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 143.
49. Puar, Coda, 157.
214 Kim Q. Hall

presupposes identity and thus disavows futurity, or perhaps more accu-

rately, prematurely anticipates and thus fixes a permanence to forever,
while assemblage and its espousal of what cannot be known, seen, or
heard, or has yet to be known, seen, or heard, allows for becoming beyond
or without being.50 Puar also criticizes identity politics that are informed by
intersectional frameworks as examples of temporal suffocation.51
While I have no doubt that intersectional analysis can be used in ways
that foreclose an openness to the future (the not yet) by presupposing iden-
tities that remain fixed in all contexts, I do not think this ossified conception
of identity is endemic to intersectional frameworks. In fact, Gloria Anzaldas
La Prieta arguably offers an example of an intersectional framework that
reflects an ontology of assemblage Puar sees as most conducive to queer
futurity. Anzalda writes,
The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing
me, has forced me to achieve a kind of equilibrium. Both cultures deny me
a place in their universe. Between them and among others, I build my own
universe, El Mundo Zurdo. I belong to myself and not to any one people. ...
We are the queer groups, the people that dont belong anywhere, not in the
dominant world nor completely within our respective cultures. Combined
we cover so many oppressions. But the overwhelming oppression is the
collective fact that we do not fit, and because we do not fit we are a threat.
Not all of us have the same oppressions, but we empathize and identify
with each others oppressions. ... In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affini-
ties and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet.52
I have quoted Anzalda at length because this passage demonstrates that in-
tersectional analyses need not oppose an ontology of assemblage. Anzalda
attends to the networks of multiplicities that shape naturecultural being
and affinities in the world, while also acknowledging differences within
those networks. Furthermore, she offers a conception of queerness oriented
toward a politics of possible alliance and planetary transformation. It is mis-
fitting53 (i.e., the presence and insufficiency of identity borders) that creates
the possibility of affinities in El Mundo Zurdo.

50. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 216.

51. Ibid., 222. In I Would Rather Be a Cyborg than a Goddess: Becoming-
Intersectional in Assemblage Theory, philoSOPHIA 2.1 (2012): 5354, Puar
locates the problem of reification of the method of intersectionality in the
disciple of womens studies, not in the concept of intersectionality itself. Puars
position in this more recent essay seems compatible with the account I offer here.
52. Gloria Anzalda, La Prieta, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical
Women of Color, ed. Cherre Moraga and Gloria Anzalda (New York: Kitchen
Table, 1981/1983), 209.
53. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability
Concept, Hypatia: Journal of Feminist Philosophy 26.3 (2011): 591609.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 215

In my reading Anzalda presents a way of thinking that shares affinities

with Braidottis notion of becoming-earth, a concept that reflects the fact
that humans are a part of earth systems of life as embodied and embed-
ded entities.54 While embedded, we are not fixed. As Nancy Tuana notes,
understanding that distinctions between nature and culture (and between
groups) can and perhaps should be made is not the same as asserting that
those distinctions are fixed for eternity and innate.55 According to Tuana,
the burden is on those who make distinctions to take responsibility for the
distinctions they make,56 to explain why, in which context, and for what pur-
pose they matter. To explain the non-fixed but non-random distinctions she
has in mind, Tuana offers the metaphor of viscous porosity, not fluidity:
Viscosity is neither fluid nor solid, but intermediate between them. Atten-
tion to porosity of intersections helps to undermine the notion that dis-
tinctions, as important as they might be in particular contexts, signify a
natural or unchanging boundary, a natural kind. At the same time, viscos-
ity retains an emphasis on resistance to changing form, thereby a more
helpful image than fluidity, which is too likely to promote a notion of open
possibilities and to overlook sites of resistance and opposition or attention
to complex ways in which material agency is often involved in interactions,
including but not limited to, human agency.57
Tuana suggests the metaphor of viscous porosity as most conducive to
understanding and responding to the complex network of multiplicity that
is climate change. This metaphor has affinities with Alison Kafers relational
model of disabilitya way of understanding that moves away from defini-
tions of disability that are fixed by diagnoses toward future meanings that
cannot be known in advance, meanings that emerge in alliances that re-
main accountable to the implications of how disability is understood and in
which contexts.58 For Kafer, understanding the ambiguities surrounding
the meaning and use of disability is crucial for the realization of accessible
futures (19). Anzalda, Braidotti, Tuana, and Kafer thus offer resistant al-
ternatives for thinking about queerness beyond failure.
While it is true that queer is, as Alexander Doty pointed out, best un-
derstood as a doing not a beingas a verb not a noun,59 it is also true, as
Roderick Ferguson asserts, that queer theorys critique of identity has al-
ways coexisted with its Eurocentrism.60 In acknowledging the importance of

54. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 66.

55. Tuana, Viscous Porosity, 192.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., 19394.
58. Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip, 8, 1213.
59. Alexander Doty, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
60. Crosby et al., Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis, 140.
216 Kim Q. Hall

identity to queer of color work, Ferguson writes, What a lot of us were try-
ing to do and have been trying to do since is point to the invisible maneu-
vers of identity precisely in those critical formations that presume that they
have transcended identityformations that, in the presumption of removal,
have only contracted with discourses of transcendence. We cant help but
do totality, so best to know were doing it.61 If it is to be radical, a queer
conception of identity must attend to these invisible maneuvers of iden-
tity even as it positions itself against identity. To trace the invisible workings
of identity is to return to, as Gayle Salamon puts it, a notion of queer (or,
as I would say, queer crip feminist) as critique.62 A central feature of these
invisible maneuvers that attend to any conception or taking up of identity
is our enmeshment in the material world. That world is economic, cultural,
political, and more than human.
Taking Ferguson and Salamon as a point of departure, I would like to
return to the anti-futurity and failure that Edelman and Halberstam define
as queer. I am certainly sympathetic with their concerns and agree with
them that from within a heteronormative, reproductive framework, queers
are failures with no future. And we can no doubt, as Halberstam stresses,
look to those failures for insight regarding alternative ways of being in the
world, alternatives that could transform the world for the better for all who
are deemed un(re)productive losers. Nonetheless, I confess that Ive always
found queer anti-futurity more than a bit troubling. In the context of cli-
mate change, it seems very problematic, if not irresponsible, to dismiss the
future as hopelessly hetero- and homonormative and, therefore irrelevant
for queers.
A critically radical conception of queerness must ask about the impli-
cations of its conception of the future and failure for the development of a
strategy for meaningfully addressing the myriad harms of climate change.
Critical thinking about our posthuman condition today requires, as Braid-
otti puts it, new conceptual creativity.63 This conceptual creativity involves
the development of a critical awareness of human and more-than-human
naturecultural being in the world. Thus, to develop the conceptual creativ-
ity needed to imagine and move toward sustainable futures, queer must be
dislodged from anthropocentrisms in order to effectively analyze and be re-
sponsive to the complex worlds in which we live and the futures we hope to
bring about.
My point is that intersectionaliy need not foreclose the future; rather,
it can be conceived as dynamic enmeshment. Also, the association of queer-
ness with anti-futurity and failure does not further understanding of the

61. Ibid.
62. Ibid., 126.
63. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 52, 54.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 217

context of global inequality that has given rise to the problem of climate
change and determines the nature and extent of its present and future.
Rather than no future and failure, I contend that a critically materialist
queer crip feminist critique must be informed by radical hope for queer crip
feminist eco-futures.

Sustainable Orientations, Complex Entanglements: Ice Matters

While it is not my intention to contribute to the crisis mentality critiqued
by Braidotti, the urgency of climate change cannot be overstated; it is one
of the most serious problems facing us today. Industrialization marked the
beginning of unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the Earths at-
mosphere. The reliance on fossil fuels that fueled industrialization and, as
John DEmilio64 observes, migrations to cities that created the context for
the emergence of gay and lesbian identities in Western countries, continues
to support the consumption habits of wealthy elites and has fundamentally
altered the climate of the planet in ways that threaten the welfare and exis-
tence of humans and other species.
One consequence of anthropogenic climate change is the unprecedent-
ed melting of glaciers. As James Bagost documents in the film Chasing Ice
and his book Ice: Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers,65 glaciers are melting at
such a dramatic rate that they are likely to disappear in the not-too-distant
future, some perhaps in the lifetime of the present generation. As a result of
documentation conducted by his EIS (Extreme Ice Survey) project, Bagost
asserts that Glacier Park in the U.S. will likely have to be renamed Glacier-
less Park and the Arctic Ocean is likely to be ice free by 2030.66
One might ask, How and why does ice matter? Glaciers play a cru-
cial role in regulating the Earths climate and providing drinking water.67
While some melting always has occurred during warmer months, glaciers
are melting at such a dramatic rate that most are receding without return.
Glacial melting, ocean acidification, and other impacts of climate change are

64. See John DEmilio, Capitalism and Gay Identity, in Powers of Desire: The
Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 11016.
65. Chasing Ice, DVD, directed by Jeff Orlowski (2012; New Video Group, 2013);
James Bagost, Ice Portraits of Vanishing Glaciers (New York: Rizzoli, 2012).
66. Bagost, Ice Portraits, 285.
67. The following sources outline the effects of climate change: Chris J. Cuomo,
Climate Change, Vulnerability and Responsibility, Hypatia: Journal of Feminist
Philosophy 26.4 (2011): 690714; Dale Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment:
An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Stephen
M. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Bagost, Ice Portraits. These
effects are well-documented and not in dispute by climate scientists.
218 Kim Q. Hall

already contributing to food shortages, water availability, species extinction,

sea level rise, increased storm intensity, drought, and violent conflicts in the
world. Because greenhouse gases can linger in the atmosphere for thirty
years or more before their effects are realized, we are already committed to
a certain level of climate change in the future, even if wealthy nations decide
tomorrow to completely stop fossil fuel consumption.68
Poor people are the most harmed by anthropogenic climate change and
the least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. Greenhouse gases are
produced by consumption of fossil fuels, which is an indicator of affluence.
The United States is the largest per capita consumer of fossil fuels, and thus
it produces the largest per capita emission of greenhouse gases. Given the
unpredictable but severe and long-term consequences of anthropogenic cli-
mate change, some believe the term climate chaos is a more apt character-
ization of the problem.69 Climate chaos has developed in a context of global
inequality, and it exacerbates inequality.
Climate chaos raises many questions about global injustice, questions
with which any radical queer crip feminist critique must be concerned. And
despite my appreciation for much of the queer battle cry of No future, one
concern I think we cannot overlook, in the context of climate chaos and
global injustice, is the question of what it means, as we ponder the relation-
ship between queerness and the future, to be responsive to the futures that
present action and inaction bring into existence. Of course, the harms of cli-
mate chaos are already disproportionately experienced by women, people
of color, and disabled and poor people.
According to a World Health Organization estimate in 2005, climate
change-related events contribute to 150,000 human deaths each year.70 In
addition, given that some greenhouse gases can remain in the atmosphere
for between thirty and one thousand years, it is clear that climate change-
related harms experienced in the present are the result of past emissions.71
Furthermore, given the ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the
harmful effects of the greater amount of greenhouse gas emissions at pres-
ent will be experienced by human and nonhuman beings in the future. Thus,
while present generations may not be directly harmed by current green-
house gas emissions,72 future generations will be.

68. Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment, and Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm.
69. Cuomo, Climate Change, Vulnerability and Responsibility, 692.
70. Ibid., 693.
71. Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment, and Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm.
72. I put the point this way for the sake of argument only. Clearly, present
generations are being harmed by anthropogenic climate change. Here I wish
to highlight that, while some wish to conceptualize queerness as a repudiation
of the future, the fact remains that ways of thinking and being in the present
are impacting the future.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 219

More sobering still, even if all wealthy nations ceased fossil fuel con-
sumption today, we would still be committed to a certain amount of climate
change in the future as a result of greenhouse gas emissions already present
in the Earths atmosphere. As a result, most policy discussions are about
whether to adopt a strategy of mitigation, adaptation, or some combination;
prevention is no longer a viable strategy.73 Sadly, we are past the time for
climate change prevention because climate change is already here, as evi-
denced by disappearing glaciers, and were committed to more in the future.
There is, however, still a window for influencing how much more climate
change the future will see, an issue that involves commitments to living and
thinking otherwise.74
In my view, queer theories75 have much to offer the search for alternative
ways of living and different values in the context of climate change. However,
to do so, queer critique must be oriented toward, not away from or against,
the future. And that future need not be inescapably heteronormative, able-
bodied, rehabilitative, or reproductive. In working toward what McRuer de-
scribes as the necessarily disabled and, thus, sustainable world,76 queer
theorists must adopt political commitments in the present that are oriented
toward the future, an orientation that includes critical attunement toward
nonhuman worlds and planetary systems. In fact, sustainability is a con-
cept that implies an orientation to the future.77 But it need notand indeed
should notbe a concept tethered to the future of the Child.

73. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm.

74. Ibid.; Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment; and Cuomo, Climate Change,
Vulnerability and Responsibility.
75. As is evidenced by my reliance on disability studies and feminist theoretical
insights in this paper, I believe disability and feminist theories also have much
to offer. I emphasize queer theory here because my main concern in this paper
is with how the relationship between queerness, futurity, and failure has been
understood.
76. Crosby et al., Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis, 13132.
77. See The World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common
Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987/2009). Known as the
Brundtland Commission, this commission offered the classic definition of
sustainability: meeting the needs of the present generation while enabling
future generations to meet their needs. Many environmental theorists have
argued for a slight, but nonetheless substantive, revision to that definition,
contending that sustainability should entail the flourishing of the present and
the future, not simply meeting needs. To borrow a concept from Agamben,
sustainability involves more than ensuring bare life in the present and future.
For more on bare life, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and
Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998).
220 Kim Q. Hall

In his appeal for sustainable futures, McRuer writes of a necessarily

disabled world that is inhabitable, sustainable, and livable.78 Building on
McRuers claim, a queer crip feminist perspective on sustainable futures
asks, Inhabitable and livable for whom or what? Braidotti argues that
understanding and being responsive to the complexity of naturecultural
lives in the world today requires an openness to the possibility of a future
without humans, the task of thinking non-anthropocentrically and non-nar-
cissistically about life.79 While Braidotti does not mean that we should be
unconcerned with the welfare and flourishing of human beings, her point is
the task of non-narcissistic, non-anthropocentric thinking about life and the
future is central to an ethic of sustainability,80 an ethic in which our concept
of future includes the organic and inorganic, the human and nonhuman,
while maintaining a hermeneutics of suspicion regarding how we establish
boundaries between entities and for what purpose. In short, realizing sus-
tainable futures entails conceptions of queer futures that are entangled81
with and responsive to glaciers and other human and nonhuman entities on
the planet.
In Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, Nietzsche writes,
[P]hilosophy, as far as I have so far understood and lived it, means liv-
ing voluntarily among ice and high mountainsseeking out everything
strange and questionable in existence, everything so far placed under a
ban by morality. Long experience, acquired in the course of such wander-
ings in what is forbidden, taught me to regard the causes that so far have
prompted moralizing and idealizing in a very different light from what may
seem desirable.82
Nietzsches understanding of philosophy as that which involves wandering
and seeking out what has been deemed by prevailing morality as strange
and questionable is quite queer. Of course, by bringing in Nietzsche here, I
dont mean to suggest that he was literally referencing climate change. My
point in this brazenly queer crip feminist appropriation is that Nietzsches
thinking about how one becomes what one is requires thinking with nonhu-
man life, thinking with ice and high mountains. Considering Nietzsches fo-
cus on nonhuman life and the inanimate, we can see why ice should matter
as a crucial component of thinking through what it means to be human and

78. Crosby et al., Queer Studies, Materialism, and Crisis, 131.

79. Braidotti, The Posthuman, 121.
80. Ibid., 12122.
81. Karen Barads concept of entanglement captures the interactive, emergent
relationship between matter and meaning, nature and culture. Meeting the
University Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
82. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1989), 218.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 221

for imagining the future. Dislodged from anthrocentrisms, a queer concep-

tion of the future can move beyond exclusive anthropocentric and reproduc-
tive focus on future generations toward future generationthe resistant
commitment to generating alternative communities and modes of being.83
In his discussion of climate change and the nature of responsibili-
ties to the future, Dale Jamieson describes the problem of sentimental
transitivity,84 or, ones sense of responsibility to the future based on the
fact that the future is populated by ones descendents. This anthropocen-
tric conception of the future informs oft-heard declarations that one ought
to change ones consumption patterns to ensure that ones grandchildren
and great-grandchildren will have a planet that enables them to meet their
needs and flourish. The problem with sentimental transitivity is, as Jamie-
son points out, it doesnt extend beyond a few generations. Beyond that, it
becomes difficult for most people to imagine what the daily lives of future
people will be like, much less have a clear picture of what their actual needs
might be.85
Here is where a queer crip feminist critique of reproductive futurity
and Jamiesons critique of sentimental transitivity can usefully inform
each other. It seems that the future of the Child is a future that cant be
imagined, let alone meaningfully cared about, beyond a few generations.
However, to address climate change, we must consider our responsibility
to the further future. Responsibility, for global elites who do most of the
climate change emitting,86 involves thinking about and acting for the ben-
efit of beings (human and nonhuman) who are not like us. Responsibility
involves, in other words, thinking and acting for the benefit of those who do
most of the climate change-related dying.87 Heteronormative imaginaries

83. Here I build on Braidottis distinction between future generations and future
generation. The concept future generations remains anthropocentric in its
reference to future generations of human beings (and even more narrowly,
ones childrens childrens children, etc.). This is the concept of the future
reflected in conservative understandings of sustainability as preservation
of the present in the future. By contrast, future generation is a posthuman
concept of the future as an unknown and possibly unknowable site of future
becomings. This concept paves the way for a more progressive understanding
of sustainability as commitment to nonanthropocentric flourishing in
defamiliarized futures. The Posthuman, 113.
84. Jamieson, Ethics and the Environment, 191.
85. Ibid., 19192.
86. Dale Jamieson, Climate Change, Responsibility and Justice, Science and
Engineering Ethics 16.3 (2010): 438.
87. Ibid. Jamieson refers specifically to poor people in the economic South. I have
added concern for non-humans.
222 Kim Q. Hall

of the future are not only deadly for queers, they are deadly for human and
more-than-human life, and irresponsible in the context of climate change.
A queer crip feminist conception of the future understands the present
as a site of material and temporal entanglement. An entangled conception
of the relationship between the present and future entails grappling not
only with that which is to come;88 it also entails challenging what it means
to be human and understanding that the sustainable, livable disabled fu-
ture (to borrow from McRuer) is more-than-human.89 Using the concept of
transcorporeality to describe the entanglement of the human and more-
than-human world, Stacy Alaimo writes, Imagining human corporeality
as trans-corporeality, in which the human is always intermeshed with the
more-than-human world, underlines the extent to which the substance of
the human is ultimately inseparable from the environment.90 Understood
through the lens of the entanglement of transcorporetality, it is a mistake
to conceive of nature as mere background or resource (2). As Jos Mu-
oz and Judith Butler91 remind us, the question of what it means to be hu-
man has long been part of queer theory. For example, following Butler, there
is a connection between gendering and humanizing the body such that a
body with no discernable binary gender is dehumanized.92 Meanwhile, Mu-
oz defends a queer utopian disruption [of] any ossified understanding
of the human,93 and Mel Chen94 offers the concept of animacy to explain
how queerness can emerge from the affective interaction between bod-
ies, objects, and discourses. To be consistent with its aims of questioning
the meaning, nature, and effect of borders between identities and entities,
queer studies must critically engage with the human conditions entangle-
ment with all of life and the planet.
Lets return for a moment to glaciers and consider how they might be
understood from a queer crip feminist perspective. From this perspective,
glaciers are more than nonhuman objects acted upon by humans. Glaciers
and other entities in the nonhuman world form the context in which one at-
tempts to figure out what it means to become human. Additionally, glaciers
are not passive, as geologists know; they carry within them the history of

88. For example, McRuer, Crip Theory, and Puar, Coda.

89. The notion of entanglement builds on new materialist critiques offered by
Coole and Frost, Introducing the New Materialisms; Alaimo, Bodily Natures;
Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; and Braidottis notion of critical
posthumanism in The Posthuman.
90. Alaimo, Bodily Natures, 2.
91. Muoz, Cruising Utopia, and Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York:
Routledge, 2004).
92. Butler, Undoing Gender.
93. Muoz, Cruising Utopia, 2526.
94. Chen, Animacies.
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 223

the world. By studying ice cores, scientists can trace climate patterns for bil-
lions of years of Earths history. Thus, glaciers carry within them a history of
the planet with and without humans; they affect and are affected by human
and nonhuman activity on Earth. From a queer crip feminist perspective,
concern for disappearing glaciers need not be concern that the future Child
will be unable to experience them or live where his/her ancestors lived.
Instead, a queer crip feminist concern for glaciers understands queering the
human as critically entangled with the planet and its systems, with human
and more-than-human worlds. Queer crip feminist concern for the future
is not a concern only for ones children; it is also a concern for the complex
entanglements in which lives and the planet are materialized.

Radical Hope
Rather than dismiss the future as no place for queers, I contend that a radi-
cal queer crip feminist concept of the future must be informed by respon-
siveness to a present and future of climate change, and include an openness
to and critical consideration of uncertainty. The future of climate change is
characterized by uncertainty, and it is a future in which many of the things
global elites currently take for granted might very well cease to existdaily
hot showers, private cars, frequent air travel, and other luxuries that consti-
tute a fossil-fuel supported, consumption-centered life.95 Thus, the future of
climate change will be queer and disabled in the sense that current norms
for privileged human life, including mobility and the planets climate, will
not be in operation. This awareness of a profoundly altered future can pro-
vide the ground for the development of queer perspectives on alternative
ways of being in the world that are informed by radical hope for a more sus-
tainable future, but only if informed by a concept of the future that resists
queer anthropocentrisms. Radical queer crip feminist critique can thereby
reorient itself to the future in its commitment to experiments in living,96
experiments informed by a concept of the future beyond queer anthropo-
centrisms and shaped by resistance founded on radical hope, not failure.
In his discussion of climate change, Allen Thompson makes a case for
understanding radical hope as a virtue of courage that, if adopted, can en-
able successful negotiation of the challenges of climate change. For Thomp-
son, radical hope is a character [trait] best suited to radical change and a
virtue in the face of cultural devastation.97 It is, he says, a virtue that is ac-
quired by developing a vision of how to refit ourselves to a form of the good

95. Allen Thompson, Radical Hope for Living Well in a Warming World, Journal
of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23.12 (2010): 52.
96. Ibid. Braidottis The Posthuman also discuss experiments in living as part of
radical critical engagement with human naturecultural being in the world.
97. Thompson, Radical Hope for Living Well in a Warming World, 44.
224 Kim Q. Hall

that outstrips the conceptual resources of contemporary culture.98 Radical

hope, according to Thompson, is a virtue in a context of transition to an as
yet unimagined and unimaginable future, a future in which it is still possible
for one to experience and imagine ones life as good.99
While I am less interested in thinking about radical hope as a virtue, I
find it a very useful concept for thinking about queer crip feminist political
commitments and concepts of the future that are accountable to the reali-
ties of climate change. Radical hope for queer crip feminist eco-futures must
desire and commit to alternative ways of life and relationship in a context
of uncertainty (including relationship to the planet and the organic and in-
organic beings with which we share it). This perspective is hopeful to the
extent that the uncertainty is understood as a site of possibility for being
and living otherwise. Such hope entails a desire for and obligation to the
future much like Derridas notion of an ethic whose requirements cannot
be fully achieved but that oblige us entirely anyway.100 It may not be pos-
sible for us to always do what we should to enable flourishing in the further
future, in part because in the absence of sentimental transitivity we cannot
know what flourishing in the further future will require. Nevertheless, we
are obliged to take the further future into account and to do what we can to
ensure future flourishing, future generation. Minimally, this must require
sustained commitment to imagining the future as more-than-human. Doing
so makes the future accessible to human beings who have been dehuman-
ized as well as nonhuman beings.
Although radical hope is without assurance, the act of making a politi-
cal commitment to the realization of alternative, disabled futures is an act of
hope, not failure, and there are many examples of radical hope in queer crip
feminist contexts. Radical hope is not nave idealism or optimism. Contrary
to Edelmans declaration that the future is not for queers, Muoz proclaims
that being queer is about the future:
Queerness is not yet here ... [w]e are not yet queer. We may never touch
queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued
with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us

98. Ibid.
99. Ibid., 51.
100. Jacques Derrida, Eating Well, or The Calculation of the Subject: An Interview
with Jacques Derrida, in Who Comes After the Subject?, trans. Peter Connor
and Avital Ronell (London: Routledge, 1991). For excellent discussions of
the implications of Derridas notion of a hyperbolic ethic for food and animal
ethics, see Lisa Heldke, An Alternative Ontology of Food: Beyond Metaphysics,
Radical Philosophy Review 15.1 (2012), and Kelly Oliver, Animal Lessons: How
They Teach Us to Be Human (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
 Climate Change, Radical Hope, and Queer Crip Feminist Eco-Futures 225

as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine the
future. The future is queernesss domain.101
Muozs conception of the future as queer because it is always not yet re-
flects radical hope for an alternative world of possibility. Halberstam argues
that queer failure can be a source of creative alternatives to neoliberal het-
ero/homonormativity. However, to the extent that realizing those alterna-
tives requires us to fail well and often, as Halberstam puts it,102 actually
requires succeeding, not failing, at failure. Thus, Halberstams understanding
of the creative, imaginative potential of queerness seems best understood
as a form of radical hope rather than a position of anti-futurity or an art of
failure. As a source of radical hope, queerness is no failure. Instead, radical
queer crip feminist commitment to living otherwise provides a resource for
critically and responsibly attending to climate change. It invites and sustains
radical hope for the realization of queer crip feminist eco-futures.

101. Muoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.

102. Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 24.