Queering the Future: Rethinking Dystopia in the Anthropocene

Abstract

A large part of twenty-first century speculative writing is shaped by a sense of dystopian futures invading the present. Many of these stories follow the narrative that humanity will soon go extinct as a result of anthropogenic climate change. This is the dominant cultural understanding of the Anthropocene. However, this narrative reproduces a futurity built on capitalist, heteronormative, white supremacist, and human exceptionalist worldviews that reduce the future to the continued existence of humanity through reproduction, and homogenise the experience of living in the Anthropocene. At the same time, more and more speculative writing that critiques the Anthropocene from all kinds of perspectives is emerging. Because reproduction-based futurity is falling apart in the face of dystopia, stories of queer desire and hope are a vital space from where alternative futurities can be imagined. In this research, I examine three recent queer environmental dystopian stories to map the role of love in the formation of queer futurity. I examine how the protagonists of these narratives queer the capitalist, heteronormative, white supremacist, and human exceptionalist norms of identity, time, and the categories of utopia and dystopia by rediscovering the presence of love in the Anthropocene. I show that queer environmental dystopias resist the dominant dystopian narrative of the Anthropocene from a critical perspective that balances dystopia and utopia: queer futurity exists only as a glimpse on the horizon, informed by the dominant power relations of the past and the present. In these case studies, love becomes a speculative force that allows characters to go beyond their fear of the dystopian present and instead let their desire flow freely. I argue that centring queer environmental dystopias in academic approaches to the Anthropocene both opens up spaces for critical interrogations of Anthropocene discourse and offers humanity ways of finding hope in the face of dystopia.