Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions

This essay explores representations of parasitism and crisis in queer theory and public climate discourse in order to situate queer critiques of reproduction in the context of neoliberalism’s ongoing carbon-driven extinctions. Focusing on racialized climate research that predicts the spread of mosquito-borne diseases from South to North in a warming world, the essay argues for the significance of ambient forms of reproduction that move across both species and geographic zones of waste and surplus. In contrast to queer-negative arguments for the sovereign refusal of reproduction, this essay contends that queer publics are always already locked into complex ecologies of reproduction embedded in the carbon economy. A queer-inhumanist critique thus requires understanding lateral forms of affective entanglement that link geographically and temporally distant bodies through ecological and economic processes of extermination.