Chapter Queer Death Studies

Overview & Synopsis

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.