Introduction: Queer Convivialist Perspectives for Sustainable Futures

Abstract

The special issue of World Futures on “queer convivialist perspectives for sustainable futures” focuses its attention on the potential insights that queer approaches may bring to sustainability research and to the search for sustainable futures. It suggests a queering of conviviality, reaching beyond the anthroponormative limitation of the Convivialist Manifesto and its lack of attention to bodies, while taking up its focus on humans as desiring beings and its implicit invitation to queer good lives. The contributed articles share transdisciplinary (academic and arts-based) research that offers analyses and interpretations opening up new perspectives for transformation of individuals and society.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• body
• convivialism
• queer
• queer ecology
• queering
• sustainability

Introduction

Many inter- and transdisciplinary researchers from various horizons have dedicated their efforts in past decades to a search process for desirable futures, under the term “sustainability” or “sustainable development.” This search process is also pursued by the journal World Futures, which in its “Aims and Scope” includes the goal of “building a sustainable and humanistic future.” Several articles and special issues of World Futures have focused explicitly on sustainability under different perspectives: Over the past decade, one special issue dealt with the relations between globalism and localization in socio-ecological crisis (Canty, 2015); another one focused on transdisciplinarity and creativity in the sustainability research conducted at the University of Veracruz in Mexico (Vargas Madrazo & Sánchez Vigil, 2018).

The journal is also engaged for a long time in the discourses and practice of transdisciplinary research, which were thematized in another special issue (McGregor, 2014). Many academics and journals from the field of “Sustainability Science” have, in their search for science-society-collaborative solutions, privileged and deployed a specific approach to transdisciplinarity (the so-called “Zurich” school) while neglecting others (including especially the so-called “Nicolescuian” school—see McGregor, 2015). By comparison, World Futures holds a space for debate including various approaches to transdisciplinarity.

World Futures is also especially involved in advancing the discourse and practice of complexity research, with an understanding of general complexity inspired by the oeuvre of Edgar Morin, and connected to transdisciplinarity, as exemplified in yet another special issue (Montuori, 2013).

Notably, one of the journal’s special issues was dedicated to “Nature and Eros: Love in the Planetary Era” (Mickey & McAnally, 2012). In that issue, a participative relationship with nature was suggested (Wegmann, 2012), aiming to connect science with the myth of a living Earth (Segall, 2012) and to develop empathy, love and compassion for the more-than-human world (Jenkins, 2012). That special issue suggested the idea of an Eros of the living universe as a response to Western culture’s separation from the Earth (Brady & Swimme, 2012). Inspired by ecofeminist insights, that special issue shared a vision of a sustainable globalization where a “planetary love” would be “characterized by non-coercive, mutually transformative contact, which opens spaces of respect and responsibility for the unique differences and otherness of planetary subjects (humans and nonhumans)” (Mickey & Carfore, 2012, p. 122).

However, this journal did not host yet a conversation on the potential insights from queer approaches—as in queer theory, queer studies, LGBTQI+ ¹ communities, and post-queer approaches—for the search process of sustainability. Such a conversation has also not taken foot yet in the field of Sustainability Science either. But it has been going on elsewhere, for at least the two decades since Greta Gaard (1997) suggested to develop a “queer ecofeminism” that would complement ecofeminism with insights from queer theory in order to combine their critical insights on (and their search for alternatives to) the oppressions connected to speciesism, anthropocentrism, and oppressive notions of Nature in general within patriarchal and heteronormative hegemony. Gaard (1997) focused especially on the self/other binary structure grounding this hegemony and linking different processes of separation, marginalization and domination. Her call has been especially taken up since then by a discourse on “queer ecology” or “queer ecologies” (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010) that challenges the dominant conceptions of nature and of ecologies by both deconstructing how heteronormative biases tainted the natural sciences (and pointing to “queer” sexualities and phenomena in the natural world), and stressing the subjugated ecological knowledges and politics that come from non-heteronormative sexual and gender positions.

Connecting queer-ecological thinking with the ideals of planetary erotics mentioned above is the notion of a “sexecology” (a.k.a. “ecosexuality”) that was championed by the artists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle. Their artivist (artistic + activist) movement proposes a queerly literal reading of the “love for the Earth”—considering the Earth not as a Mother but as a Lover, while engaging in humorous artistic performance and sex-positive activism whereby sensuous, sensual and sexual intercourse with the Earth’s elements are thematized (Stephens et al., 2011).

At the convergence of queer ecologies and ecosexuality, Vancouver-based artist and sex educator Caffyn Kelley (a.k.a. Caffyn Jesse) argued that

homosexuals must bring a particular sensibility to the experience of nature. Abhorred as unnatural, and alternately as bestial, castigated as primitive, and described as the strange fruit of a civilization grown too distant from the earth, identifying as homosexual, queer, gay or lesbian makes one attuned to the culture of nature. Nature appears not as a timeless essence, separate from human experience […] Queer is a way of choosing a radical openness instead of a fixed identity. A queer ecology might eschew the essentializing, anthropocentric tendencies of identity and identification (including taxonomies of species, gender, race), and allow us to instead choose complexity, fluidity and interconnection. (Kelley, n.d., n.p.)

For precision’s sake, I need to point out that most critiques of “anthropocentrism” make sense as critiques of an “ontological anthropocentrism” and of an “ethical anthropocentrism.” Ontological anthropocentrism “refers to a worldview according to which humans are by nature ‘really’ the center and final purpose of the world;” ethical anthropocentrism “postulates that only humans have intrinsic value and therefore that only humans can be objects of direct moral consideration” (Gorke, 2003, p. 335). However, there is also an “epistemological anthropocentrism” found for example often in Sustainability Science, which is an epistemological humility based on “the idea that we can basically only recognize and judge the things of the world from a specifically human perspective” (ibid.). Because I see value in epistemological anthropocentrism, insofar as it constitutes a recognition of a situated knowledge, while I agree with the critiques of ontological and ethical anthropocentrisms, I therefore suggested elsewhere that it would make sense to re-label ontological and ethical anthropocentrisms as “anthroponormativity” (Kagan, 2019b, pp. 172–173).

Queer ecology contributes to a more complex understanding of ecologies and of the relations between humans and other species in socio-ecological systems.

[One’s] interest in queering ecology lies in enabling humans to imagine an infinite number of possible Natures. The living world exhibits monogamy. But it also exhibits orgies, gender transformation, and cloning. What, then, is natural? All of it. None of it. Instead of using the more-than-human world as justification for or against certain behavior and characteristics, let’s use the more-than-human world as a humbling indication of the capacity and diversity of all life on Earth. Let’s stop congratulating ourselves. Instead, let’s give a round of applause to the delicious complexity. Let us call this complexity the queer, and let us use it as a verb. Let us queer our ecology. (Johnson, 2011, n.p.)

Furthermore, the approach of queer ecology is one that more specifically contributes to the approach of “general complexity” (Morin, 2007) at epistemological and political levels because it fosters a percipience of tensions and harmonies-in-contradictions beyond naive perceptions of harmonious integration in socio-ecological systems. This link to Morinian complexity was one of the reasons I developed a growing interest in that approach, as a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of cultural sciences, social sciences and sustainability research:

I am seeing in queer ecology an antidote to holistic ideals of consensus and organic unity that might lead towards forms of green totalitarianism. On the contrary, we should seek discourses and practices that value pluralism, contestation and tensions, compromises and regulated competition, as the political dimension of cultures of sustainability based on complex uni-plurality. Beyond the traditional liberal understanding of pluralism, the feeling of queerness in NatureCulture’s vitality, is awakening us to the value of a diversity of ways of being in the world. A queer ecology, as opposed to a straightforwardly harmonious culture of nature, can contribute to our sensibility to uni-plurality: This is an aesthetic question. (Kagan, 2012, p. 26) ²

The Emergence of this Special Issue

In the summer of 2016, I curated a symposium entitled “Embodying Enlivenment—Queer, SM and Eco-Sexual Perspectives” at the “Xplore” Festival in Berlin, which constituted the ideal space where to start the process that eventually led to the production of this special issue of World Futures.

“Xplore—The Festival on the Art of Lust,” held every year in Berlin (Germany) since 2004 (and meanwhile also in Rome, Paris, Sydney, Copenhagen, and Barcelona), is a three-day event on creative sexuality, BDSM, body work, dance, performance and ritual. Its development is part of an effort to develop creative, mindful and reflexive sex-positive spaces (Ruckert, this volume). The Xplore festival includes workshops, performances, lectures and play-spaces. The very special quality of this event is to bring together very diverse communities, social milieus and lifeworlds: theater, art, self-exploration, sexuality (in various ways: BDSM, Tantra, “sexpositivism,” etc.), philosophy and social sciences. The festival offers its participants a secure place for very “hands-on” discovery of yet-untried practices, for experiments and also for frequent changes of roles and attitudes. ³ Xplore constitutes a fascinating context for reflecting on embodiment, with and also beyond art, as it exemplifies a playful fusion of art, body practices and sexuality that joyfully moves beyond deeply seated conventions. This includes traditional couple-based sexual and sentimental relationships, and the usual fragmentation between hetero, gay, lesbian and trans + queer communities. ⁴

In particular, the 2016 symposium articulated some crucial questions that this special issue of World Futures is set to further investigate:

With the Xplore Symposium, held in parallel to and as an integral part of the Xplore Festival, I was searching for ways in which different embodied and sexual practices may relate to an ecological way of thinking and way of life, as part of my ongoing exploration of the cultural dimension of sustainability […] We ventured into original ways of thinking and experiencing ourselves as hybrid becomings: becoming queerer and other, becoming animals, becoming plants, becoming meta-beings (meta-humans, meta-animals) and overall approaching a richer and deeper experience of becoming ecologies […] I was especially interested in how, in an age still marked by the modern myths of Mastery and Control (for example in the main bulk of science, policy and management discourses about sustainable development), but where these myths have started to crumble down (especially with the acknowledgement of life’s qualitative complexity), the rediscovery of the body, of one & many ecology/ecologies, and of intelligence beyond the narrowly rational intellectual realm, is opening up new perspectives for transformation of individuals and society. (Kagan, 2017a, pp. 36–37)

The symposium allowed to bring together several academic streams: The invited speakers at the first Xplore Symposium in 2016 included pioneers of queer ecology—scholar Catriona Sandilands and artist and sex educator Caffyn Jesse (a.k.a. Caffyn Kelley), as well as philosopher of “Enlivenment” Andreas Weber, “meta-humanist” philosopher and artist Jaime del Val, BDSM researchers—Robin Bauer and Elisabeth Wagner, and philosopher of masculinities Thomas Burø (see Kagan, 2017a).

The combination of the 2016 symposium and festival sketched the possibility of

acquiring an artistically experimentalist experience of becoming ecologies—not merely as an arcane intellectual experience within an environmental humanities conference or a reading of queer theory, but as a joyfully estranging, deeply embodied corporeal exploration of sex-ecologies within oneself and with others. (Kagan, 2017a, p. 39)

The subsequent exchanges with symposium participants and further scholars and artists led up to the Call for Papers for this special issue, which sought out contributions that would build on insights emerging around “queer ecologies” (Mortimer-Sandilands & Erickson, 2010) and around a queering of the political economy away from “Capitalocentrism” (Gibson-Graham, 1996). I looked for contributions that would aim to contribute to “politics of possibility” (Gibson-Graham, 2006) and dare to speculate and envision queer and convivial sustainable futures (Kagan, 2017b). In coherence with the approach of World Futures, I welcomed papers that would demonstrate a sensibility to general (a.k.a. qualitative) complexity (Morin, 2008) and work with a “transdisciplinary hermeneutics” (Dieleman, 2017b).

Furthermore, contributors were encouraged to take up Eve Sedgwick’s invitation to a “reparative reading” that overcomes the limitations of “hermeneutics of suspicion” and its “paranoid reading” dominating social theorizing (Sedgwick, 2003), and instead seeks to contribute to personal healing and social transformation.

I looked for approaches to the cultural dimensions of convivialism and of sustainable futures that would no longer perpetuate the delusions of “cultural identities” (Jullien, 2016), but instead seek queer approaches to culturalizing convivialism and sustainable futures.

I searched for contributions that would explore how knowing and making worlds with the body, rather than “against” the body, relates to philosophical, political and civilizational quest for and questions about the kind of society we want to become. Some possible orientations were suggested in the Call for Papers around the notions of “Enlivenment” (Weber, 2013), contemporary animisms (Abram, 1996; Ingold, 2012), or Metahumanism (Val & Sorgner, 2011). Moreover, I sought out discussions of practices such as BDSM, eco-sexual, tantric or other deeply corporeal forms of learning qualitative complexity. Across all of these thematic directions, I asked contributors to articulate their own responses to the challenge of “queering convivialism.” This is meant as a constructive-critical response to the Convivialist Manifesto.

Queering Convivialism

In 2013 and at the initiative of Alain Caillé, a coalition of about 40 French-speaking intellectuals, politically left-, green- and center-left-oriented, published in French language a Manifeste Convivialiste (Les Convivialistes, 2013), which was then soon translated to other languages, in English as Convivialist Manifesto (Alphandéry et al., 2014). The manifesto was further debated around the world in the following years (e.g. in Germany, see Adloff & Heins, 2015). The authors of the convivialist manifesto sought a common ground across the diversity of sensibilities and approaches they came from. ⁵ The manifesto highlighted shared concerns, values and approaches across a diversity of movements, all seeking social-ecological justice (whether outside of, or within a reformed capitalism).

The Convivialist Manifesto has a clear understanding that the challenge of sustainability for the times to come is not about preserving and sustaining a “good life” of the same type as what affluent societies have been enjoying for a few decades. The manifesto sums up several of the socio-ecological compounding threats facing Humanity, as did sustainability researchers over the past decades. In the search for a more sustainable good life on Planet Earth, the manifesto is right to stress principles of interdependency and care.

Sensible to general/qualitative complexity, the manifesto hints that “convivial” is not equated with “consensus-ist” conformist political correctness, and should not drift into that direction. Instead, it suggests a balance of cooperation and antagonism: “coopérer et s’opposer” (Les Convivialistes, 2013, pp. 12, 25–26, 27). This means, to both turn away from the exclusive focus on market competition which is currently dominant (and dwarfing cooperation) in contemporary societies, but also to prevent the very high risk of a consensus ideology that would invariably end up into a form of soft totalitarianism. The challenge is to develop, in very concrete situations and contexts, a fine art of balancing the four dynamics of competition, cooperation, antagonism and unity.

The manifesto can be read in an artful and queer interpretation (Kagan, 2015, 2017b):

Instead of preserving good life, the search for sustainability should be interpreted as inviting us to experiment with other lives, to open up to futures-oriented questions, and to queer these other, potential (good?) lives, taking resilience as a moving horizon […] It requires qualities of ambiguity, ambivalence and the “musical ear” praised by Morin, i.e. it craves for artistic competences fostering the aesthetic experience of complexity. In short, the convivialist “coopérer et s’opposer” is less a science (in the narrow sense of the term) than it is an “art de vivre ensemble” [Les Convivialistes, 2013, p. 14]: an art of living together. […] The function of a queering artistic process is not to bring certainties, to win over your audience to your critical message, to necessarily “make them understand” something that you already identified and thought up for yourself. [It is] on the contrary, to foster uncertainties that stimulate de-normalizing and de-naturalizing aesthetic experiences and thought & embodiment processes. It is a process of distanciation and of “freaky desires”—to paraphrase the parlance of artist and “freaky theorist” Renate Lorenz [2012], keeping you in a (warm flux of) intellectual, emotional and corporeal confusion, keeping ambiguities and ambivalences thriving for a longer moment. From such an experience can arise more interesting queerings of “good” lives, taking us to other desires, elsewhere than within the path dependencies of affluent consumerism. (Kagan, 2017b, pp. 153, 155)

The convivialist manifesto states as foundational “principles of common humanity, common sociality, individuation” (Alphandéry et al., 2014, p. 30), echoing Morin’s three levels of human identity as individual-society-species, not reducing these to only one level. The challenge that humans must face today, is, however, not only to move beyond the reductionism of a single level of identity, but also to move beyond a reductionist identitarian trinity of speciesism, communitarianism and individualism. Especially regarding the risk of speciesism, the convivialist manifesto may be lacking, according to several contributions in this volume that point out the need to queer convivialism by pushing past its speciest tendency. “Here the ‘queering apart’ (or ‘freaking out’) of [such] tendencies is of utmost importance. More generally, a vigilant and chronic process of queering is necessary to ward off a rigidified moralism within any convivialist-identified and/or sustainability-oriented movement” (Kagan, 2017b, p. 155).

The convivialist manifesto did recognize humans as beings driven by desire (Les Convivialistes, 2013, p. 18), and the importance of the mobilization of affects and passions (ibid., p. 36). But it failed to notice the importance of developing senses, sensitivities and sensibilities to our environments, as multiple and interrelated modes of corporeal learning and embodied knowing, opening humans up to their complex enmeshment with environments.

This special issue of World Futures aims to address some corporeal learnings that queered and queering bodies can bring to conviviality, alongside questions that were raised at the 2016 Xplore Symposium:

Corporeal practices allow us to learn through embodiment, whether they are sexual, gender-related and/or otherwise exploring new territories of self and others. But how do these practices relate to existing social order? How far do they maintain the status quo, titillate social change, or even maybe foster deeper social transformation? (Kagan, 2017a, p. 37)

In sum: To queer convivialism means to search for other ways of living well together, ways that open up more complex and more serendipitous learnings beyond hegemonic norms, as further outlined in the following pages.

As I am writing these lines, the news reaches me that a Second Convivialist Manifesto has just been released (Internationale Convivialiste, 2020). The contributions in this special issue do not refer to that newest publication, which was released after all the articles for the special issue were finalized. As far as one can see in the short summary of principles on the official convivialist website, in place of the first convivialist manifesto’s four “principles of common humanity, common sociality, individuation, and managed conflict,” the second manifesto from 2020 now proposes “five principles: Common naturality, common humanity, common sociality, legitimate individuation, creative opposition,” and adds that the “five principles are subordinate to the absolute imperative of hubris control” (Les Convivialistes, 2020a). Especially, the principle of “common naturality” now states more explicitly that “like all living beings, [humans] are part of [nature] and are interdependent with it” (ibid.). It, thus, seems that the authors of the second manifesto (meanwhile 276 signatories from 33 countries—see Les Convivialistes, 2020b) may have already taken up some of the critical responses to the first manifesto? It will be up to our readers to compare and combine the insights from this special issue and the newest developments in the discourse of the “Internationale Convivialiste” (which will probably be soon available in a full English version too).

Reparative Reading for Queered Convivialism

As mentioned above, the contributions in this special issue aim not to merely offer critical analyses and discourses in the glorious tradition of critical theory’s hermeneutics of suspicion, but to also contribute to a “reparative reading” (Sedgwick, 2003), to highlight “spaces of possibilities” (Kagan, 2019a) for sustainable futures.

In her critique of the critical theory tradition, Sedgwick’s argument was not to say that hermeneutics of suspicion would produce wrong insights; “to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 128). Indeed, “the main reason for questioning paranoid practices are other than the possibility that their suspicions can be delusional or simply wrong. […] They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly” (ibid., p. 130). What it knows poorly are precisely those openings for sustainable futures, which queer approaches may otherwise generate (if not dominated by paranoia). Sedgwick thus warned against paranoid reading’s assumption that “to make something visible as a problem” would be a significant step toward the solution of said problem (ibid., p. 139).

But including other readings requires a real conscious effort because paranoia tends “to grow like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (ibid., p. 131). Paranoid reading’s “aversion to surprise” (ibid., p. 130) makes it poorly equipped to facilitate serendipitous learning. By seeking to eliminate surprise, paranoid reading “fails spectacularly […] to anticipate change” and merely achieves to reinforce itself in the belief that “things are bad and getting worse [and therefore] you can never be paranoid enough” (ibid., p. 142). On the contrary, serendipitous learning (Kagan, 2012, pp. 36–38) is a quality that should be sought after in a queering of convivialism and its search for the queering of futures, queered possibilities.

Societal spaces of possibilities are shared physical, social and mental spaces where the search process of sustainability is activated through imagination, experimentation, challenging experiences, creative and participative learning, and prefigurative doing (Kagan, 2019a; Kagan et al., 2018). The emergence of such spaces depends on the inspiration from reparative readings, for the development of concrete “real-utopian” imagination in concrete cases (Kirchberg, 2019). Sedgwick evoked, after psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, how reparative reading is about the “achievement […] to move toward a sustained seeking of pleasure […] rather than to continue to pursue the self-reinforcing because self-defeating strategies for forestalling pain offered by the paranoid/schizoid position” (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 137).

The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives [which] once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’). What makes pleasure and amelioration so ‘mere’? Only the exclusiveness of paranoia’s faith in demystifying exposure […] as if intolerable situations were famous for generating excellent solutions. (Sedgwick, 2003, p. 144)

The contributions in this special issue actively highlight the seeking of pleasure, and do not allow the hermeneutics of suspicion to silence and repress other forms of knowing and learning.

Anthropo- & Other -Cenes, and the Relational Ontology of Intra-action

The past decade has seen an immense amount of scholarly, intellectual, artistic and public discourses around the concept of the “Anthropocene.” Some of these discourses are being discussed in more details in two contributions to this special issue—I will thus keep my introduction relatively short on this point. From Anthropos—Greek word for Human, Anthropocene is the “human age” in the terminology of geology, a proposed new term for a geological age where human activity greatly impacts the Earth’s geology and ecosystems (including but not limited to climate change). The term is at once a proposed formal unit of geological epoch divisions (which gave rise to wide-scale discussions among geologists since 2008), and a culturally much more widely significant concept: The term Anthropocene has meanwhile become the center of heated debates about the current socio-ecological crisis, its origins, and most especially about the self-understandings of humans as a species, as societies and as a global economy, or to come back to Morin: human identity as individual-society-species. The discourses around the term “Anthropocene” are facing the same challenge that I mentioned above about the convivialist manifesto: the challenge of moving beyond a reductionist identitarian trinity of speciesism, communitarianism and individualism.

And, as Küpers’s contribution in this issue discusses in more details, several discourses on the “Anthropocene” fail to meet that challenge. Anthropocene, Küpers argues, seems to reinsert the “man” of “hu-man” into nature, only to re-elevate “him” above “it” as the one who promotes instrumental reason. Such discourses invoke the idea and prescriptive claims of planetary management (neo-managerialism), rule of experts, and uncritical embrace of technology. These discourses also legitimize large-scale interventions into the workings of the Earth, such as geoengineering and further non-democratic and highly technophilic or techno-deterministic approaches (Baskin, 2014). Anthropocene discourses do recognize that the long-held barriers between nature and culture are breaking down and that it is no longer “us against Nature.” At first sight, the term both resolves the illusion of an ontological separation of humans from nature and allows humans to contemplate the scope and gravity of their global impact. However, many Anthropocene discourses suggest that it is now up to humans to “decide” what nature is and what it will be. In this era, nature is us (Crutzen & Schwägerl, 2011). Accordingly, in such discourse, nature is seen as having little remaining agency, and is dependent on human good management and goodwill. For example:

It is no longer Mother Nature who will care for us, but us who must care for her. Clearly it is possible to look at all we have created and see only what we have destroyed. But that, in my view, would be our mistake. We most certainly can create a better Anthropocene. The first step will be in our own minds. The Holocene is gone. In the Anthropocene we are the creators, engineers and permanent global stewards of a sustainable human nature. (Ellis, 2011, pp. 26–27)

Such unitary, universalist concepts and claims about nature continue the modernist dream of mastery in a new way: “Nature” and “Culture” are unified, but under the rule of “Culture.” This implies that a hierarchy is imposed on that distinction (Worthy, 2013). Humans are re-inserted into “nature” only to simultaneously be elevated within it and above it. This orientation excludes that nature, natures, and natural entities and processes retain their own intrinsic value, their otherness and agency, and their sacredness. They are again “disenchanted,” while being “re-enchanted” with a modernist, universalized dream of human mastery and control now in a new configured relation to (nonhuman and human) nature, to be governed more comprehensively and perhaps even in a post-hubristic engagement. “Metaphorically, God is removed, but structurally humanity is made into God” (Baskin, 2014, p. 16) striving for self-salvation.

Furthermore, the Anthropocene discourses generally suggest the perverse notion that all humans, taken as a species, are per se responsible of the current global ecological crisis:

Anthropocene rhetoric […] frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization, albeit complexly mediated and distributed among various agents, which enables the military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe. (Demos, 2017, p. 19)

This special issue does not escape the discursive phenomenon of the “Anthropocene,” including the critical discourses that gave rise to a growing number of alternative terms in the literature, like “Capitalocene” (Moore, 2016) or “Chthulucene” (Haraway, 2016), each highlighting a distinct critical analysis and direction of hope. More specifically, in this issue, readers will find a critical discussion of the Anthropocene and orientation to an “Ecocene” (Küpers, this volume), as well as a critique of the “Algoricene” as the age of Algorithms and orientation to an imagined future “Amorphocene” (Val, this volume).

More generally, most of the contributions in this special issue relate to a relational ontology, with an understanding of the world (whatever-cene this age is called, and whatever specific discursive scenes the respective authors belong to) where nature and culture, human and non-human, body and mind, are no longer considered as distinct, neatly separate entities. The assumption of separate substantive entities is destabilized—queered. This is indeed also one aspect of the queering process: a queering of our understanding of ontology, toward an attention to relations rather than substances. ⁶

One of the visible manifestations of this relational ontology and epistemology, which runs as a golden thread throughout the special issue, is the concept of “intra-action,” which is explicitly mentioned in three contributions (Küpers, this volume; Val, this volume; Kagan, this volume). Each one of the other contributions, while not using this specific concept, unfolds a relational thinking of its own.

Especially, Küpers and Val are using Karen Barad’s (2007) concept of “intra-action” in their articles. The concept also illuminates phenomena discussed in the special issue as a whole. With this concept, which serves as an alternative to the concept of “interaction” where preexisting entities have agency upon each other, here the entities emerge to existence through their relation. In intra-action, the agency of the entities also does not preexist separately, but emerges from the relationships. So, this term is especially suitable for discussing the importance of emergence. Readers should know that Karen Barad is a theoretical physicist from the field of quantum physics. This is where the notion comes from, because elementary particles indeed do no preexist but emerge to existence through their interaction—or rather: intra-action. Barad then takes the notion beyond physics, to also describe for example how social phenomena and humans co-emerge through practices… Barad’s approach is among those that contribute to contemporary discourses in relational ontology; an approach where entities take form in the process of their own becoming and where an ontological entanglement runs through everything. From there, there are no more simple cause–effect linearities and single-ended individual agencies, in a world that is interdependent.

Not Just “Queer” but “Queering”

The field of “queer ecology” and its pertinence were already articulated above. Its insights are explicitly integrated in several contributions in this special issue (Billinghurst & Smith, this volume; Beitiks, this volume; Mühlbacher, this volume; Verkuylen, this volume).

However, some readers might be disturbed that I did not “define” queer yet. Others might still wonder about the purposes of my frequent usage of the gerund “queering” (and the past participle “queered”), rather than just the noun “queer,” in this introduction. This is due to the strategic deployment of “queer” in the special issue, as a process of queering. This also includes the insights coming from the so-called “post-queer” discourses that are echoed in some of the contributions to this issue.

As I wrote above, to queer convivialism means to search for other ways of living well together, ways that open up more complex learnings beyond hegemonic norms. This follows the suggestion that “queer identity need not be grounded in any positive truth or in any stable reality [but instead] acquires its meaning from its oppositional relation to the norm” (Halperin, 1995, p. 62). Queering is a process generating a relational disturbance of one or several dominant normativity/-ies. (Some queer writers also use the gerund “troubling.”) A working definition of “queer” for this introductory text should also be process-oriented and relational—without the intention to impose any single definition of queer upon the whole special issue, but suggesting that the following working-definition does give a possible entry key for entering in a conversation with the contributions in this issue. For this, I take up one definition given by Halperin (1995):

Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers […] it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance. It is from the eccentric positionality occupied by the queer subject that it may become possible to envision a variety of possibilities […] for restructuring […] the relations among power, truth and desire. (Halperin, 1995, p. 62)

Michel Foucault’s late work on sexuality and his interviews and interventions in gay circles (see Halperin, 1995), had already initiated some lines of inquiry to be found in strategically using “queer” in the way it is done in this special issue. For example, Foucault already saw lesbian and gay sex in general, and BDSM practices in particular, as what he called a “culture de soi” (see Foucault, 1984, pp. 51–85), a “culture and cultivation of the self” (see Foucault, 1986, pp. 39–68) as a form of “ethical artistry” (Halperin, 1995, p. 71), a potentially transformative ethical elaboration in resistance to dominant social norms. He argued in an interview:

To be gay is to be in a state of becoming […] to place oneself in a dimension where the sexual choices one makes are present and have their effects on the ensemble of our life […] These sexual choices ought to be at the same time creators of ways of life. To be gay signifies that these choices diffuse themselves across the entire life; it is also a certain manner of refusing the modes of life offered; it is to make a sexual choice into the impetus for a change of existence. (Foucault quoted in Halperin, 1995, pp. 77–78)

The prospect is then “to use, from now on, one’s sexuality to achieve a multiplicity of types of relations” (ibid., p. 78). In this quest, according to Halperin

the first challenge [Foucault] saw was ‘to make ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasures’ and accordingly, to devise relationships that might offer strategies for enhancing pleasure and might enable us to escape the ready-made formulas already available to us. […] ‘We live in a relational world that institutions have considerably impoverished’. (Halperin, 1995, p. 81)

In this context, Foucault gained for example a specific interest in BDSM practice as a strategic use of power differentials and of “domination” as a strategic game for creating shared pleasure, and not for personal or political subjugation. This is a line of thought that is further discussed in my own contribution to the special issue (Kagan, this volume), complemented by other contributions that bring further insights coming from BDSM and sexuality (Verkuylen, this volume; Ruckert, this volume; Mühlbacher, this volume) and from a reflection on desires and pleasures (Liska, this volume; Kroneis, this volume; Billinghurst & Smith, this volume; Srinivasan, this volume).

The Contributions in This Special Issue

A queering approach is also an artful one, as I argued above and elsewhere (Kagan, 2017b); and the research field of “sustainability science” is in dire need of more artful research approaches (Dieleman, 2017a; Heinrichs, 2019; Heinrichs & Kagan, 2019; Kagan, 2017b, 2019a). Accordingly, in the constitution of this special issue, I thus sought contributions that would dare to merge academic and artistic or arts-based research elements. This is reflected in the composition of the group of contributors in this issue and in the contents of their contributions: The majority of the authors, eight out of twelve, are professional artists in various fields (performance art, media art, walking art, dance, etc.). The remaining four authors (where I include myself) are no strangers to artful forms, either because they employ arts-based methods in their work, or because they take an unconventionally “artful” approach to their respective fields of research, including sustainability research, philosophy, phenomenology, cultural sciences and organizational studies. This is also reflected in the form and contents of the contributions, which are purposefully heterogeneous and contain several arts-based elements as well as accounts of and reflections on the authors’ own artistic works.

This issue starts with a theoretical reflection by Wendelin Küpers (“Queer-ing Moves: beyond Anthropocene, toward convivial, sustainable futures”) on becoming “otherwise convivial,” which further discusses, in more details than this introduction, some of the general lines of theoretical development unfolding across the special issue. Starting with a critique of Anthropocene discourses, Küpers finds inspiration especially in Merleau-Ponty’s eco-phenomenology of embodiment and flesh. He articulates a queered relational philosophy for an embodied, convivial relation with nature (“con-naturality”) and social life (“con-sociability”). Queering the “anthropos,” Küpers envisions an “anthropo-decentric” transformation toward a sustainable “convivial ecocene.”

Jaime del Val, in his contribution (“Neither Human nor Cyborg: I am a Bitch and a Molecular Swarm. Proprioception, Body Intelligence and Microsexual Conviviality”), makes a plea for a proprioception-based phenomenology, founding a “microsexual conviviality” in “Body Intelligence,” against the dangers of Artificial Intelligence in the “Algoricene.” He proposes a theory of movement and perception grounded on proprioception, i.e. the internal sense of movement of the body. He associates this theoretical work to a meta-humanist ethics of becoming, and evokes the empirical artistic techniques and improvization practices that he developed to enact modes of relation and sociality grounded on this new theory.

Helen Billinghurst & Phil Smith (“Convivial Acts for an Ecosensual Labyrinth”) exemplify an artistic practice that is queering conviviality beyond the anthropocentric limitation they find in the Convivialist Manifesto. Billinghurst & Smith developed artistic devices and strategies for ecosensuality, guided by ethics of desire. Their article discusses queer aspects of conviviality through the case of one walking-art and interdisciplinary project they conducted in Bristol in 2018–2019.

Judith Mühlbacher’s contribution (“‘Melancholic? Naturally!’: Impulses for cultural transformation from queer-ecological worldmaking, activism, and art in a Western context”) deploys ecofeminism and queer ecology for empirical insights informing sustainability research. She investigates the queer-ecological worldmaking practices of queer-identifying eco-activists and -artists. Her focus is on melancholic grieving, and her empirical approach complements qualitative social science with arts-based methods. She analyses how ecological grief creates an understanding of interdependence with the more-than-human world, as well as communities for healing.

With “Systems of Pain/Networks of Resilience,” Meghan Moe Beitiks offers a contribution that is in itself taking an arts-based, unconventional form. The main part of her contribution is a transcript (written by Audio Describer Katie Murphy) from a performance video that is part of Beitiks’ interdisciplinary artistic research. Her research, which included interviews of people with personal or professional experience of recovery, investigates stigma and prejudice as emergent barriers to healing across processes and species. The work is theoretically informed by systems ecology.

Deepak Srinivasan (“Exploring gender in South-Asian cultural memory through artistic process”) shares his artistic research at the crossing of politics, religious culture and gender in contemporary India. Revisiting South-Asian mythology and its political misuses in the light of colonial histories, Srinivasan elucidates the political and cultural developments that frame and constrain gendered public identities in India. This context is the background of Srinivasan’s own artistic practice, which transformatively reenacts rituals and myths in queered gender performances. He “reimagine[s] possibilities that diverse storytelling traditions offer to modernity” and aims to “re-eroticise the public sphere.”

Georg Kroneis (“Touching on Fetish Black Box—A Haptic Performance”) discusses an art installation and haptic/tactile performance art piece that he realized in 2019–2020. His text invokes Hartmut Böhme’s insights on fetish and his own practice of the Feldenkrais method. His work demonstrates a practical artistic exploration of concrete ways to queer convivialism through haptic and proprioception-based interpersonal encounters, with corporeal “communi-action.”

Gerhard Liska’s contribution proposes “An emancipatory topology of desire.” The author takes up the Convivialist Manifesto’s focus on humans as desiring beings. Exploring the plural functions of desire for more inclusive, sustainable and convivial futures, he identifies and discusses four manifestations of desire. Inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, Gibson-Graham, Caillois, Halberstam and others, the article also includes illustrations from the practices of cosplay (costume play) and medieval costume pageants, as well as from its author’s own artistic practice and personal biography.

Felix Ruckert, in a short essay (“Magical Spaces—Sex as Art”), exposes the main principles at work both in his choreographic work and in his efforts to create sex-positive spaces of exploration and experimentation, which are bringing together a great variety of corporeal practices and embodied knowledges (such as the Xplore festivals series, already introduced above). The article proposes seven virtues, seven qualities for “creating magic” and opening up “magical spaces.”

My own contribution to this issue investigates “BDSM as a playful learning site for qualitative complexity,” combining an autoethnographic account with insights from previous BDSM research, within a framework based on Edgar Morin’s qualitative complexity. I articulate how BDSM practice may foster a more complex understanding of power relations, how it may allow a healing deconstruction of the self, and may offer opportunities to experience complexity beyond binaries across various contexts. The text discusses for example how one concrete BDSM practice (ballbusting) may help deconstruct the performativity of masculinity.

Georgia Verkuylen (“Wish You Were Queer: Exploring the Potential of Queer Play Parties to Arouse Social Change”) conducts an empirical investigation into BDSM sex parties within the queer community. Combining a critique of dominant heteronormativity with the agonistic notion of “subaltern counterpublics” and with the perspective of a commons-based economy (after Elinor Ostrom), and positioning her discourse against neoliberalism, she focuses on the construction of spaces of inclusivity and radical participation within these queered play spaces. She concludes that the management of commons and commons-based governance may benefit from the radical culture of inclusivity developed at queer play parties.

Closing Remark & Acknowledgements

One last thing remains to be pointed out: The authors in this special issue are, for most of us, in very marginal positions with regard to academic institutions (or altogether outside of academia), and for some of us, also marginal with regard to art institutions. Moreover, this marginality is often directly related to the authors’ engagements for unconventional queering approaches. This means that for most authors and several reviewers involved in this issue, even more than for a “regular” academic benefiting from a more or less fixed institutional support structure, the making of a peer-reviewed article was an especially generous effort in a context of precarity. This fact is dramatically illustrated by the case of one contributor who had to withdraw his article because of this very precarity, i.e. because of the excessive amount of unpaid labor that this represents: Philosopher and artist Peter Banki (Founder and Director of the “School of Really Good Sex” and of the “Festival of Death and Dying” in Sydney, Australia), who was initially authoring a manuscript on “The Sex-Positive Movement in the Context of Neo-Liberalism” for this special issue, suggested that I mention this problem in the introduction. In his own words:

[I]t’s not okay that we are all working for free, while holding to academic criteria that are very time consuming and arduous. Without some institutional support, both economic and social, I do not think it is possible to do this kind of research. I think this unacceptable situation should actually be reflected on in the issue, as it belongs intrinsically to the time we’re living in. (P. Banki, personal communication, December 17, 2019)

Although I will not reflect on this problem in more details here, I consider that it needed at least to be acknowledged. If the approach initiated in this special issue, taking queer approaches, sustainability research, and convivialism into new entanglements, is to have any future as an emerging approach in some academic form, the question of institutional support will need to be raised and solved.

Meanwhile, I also want to include the usual acknowledgments: I am as guest editor of this issue, immensely thankful to the contributors for all their unpaid work—truly a work of love. Further thanks go to Alfonso Montuori for his unwavering belief in this project and his repeated encouragements, and to the teams at the journal World Futures and publisher Taylor & Francis for their competent support in producing this publication.

Notes

1 The abbreviation “LGBTQI+” stands for: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (or questioning), Intersex, with the “+” standing for more (e.g. asexual, pansexual, Two Spirited, etc.).

2 This growing interest in the approach of queer ecology further prompted me to start connecting my academic research interests with my own personal experience as a member of a couple of queer communities. The emergence of the concept for this special issue, which I initially presented to World Futures Co-Editor Alfonso Montuori in 2016 (and for which the Call for Papers was released in 2019), can be traced back to these roots.

3 The participants at Xplore are invited to use no last names, and to make no lengthy self-introductions, but instead to explore together, in small and large groups of workshop participants, embodied practices in an open-ended, mutually respectful and safe process. The Xplore festival (and the other formats created by the choreographer Felix Ruckert) attracts (as workshops presenters) international experimenters not satisfied with the existing boundaries around specific fields such as contemporary dance, yoga, body–mind spiritual practices, philosophic and artistic approaches to embodiment, Tantra, BDSM communities, queer, sex-positivism, and other sexual and otherwise embodied approaches and communities. The festival also attracts (as visitors) a range of local and international visitors who look for open and experimental sexual and embodied exploration.

4 At Xplore, all genders and sexual orientations feel welcome and the diversity is rather unusual, even though the proportion of (bi-curious or sometimes leaning toward “pansexual”) heterosexuals is relatively higher than the proportion of other sexual orientations. By the way, my comments about the festival are based on my active participation at four successive editions of Xplore Berlin (from 2015 to 2018), as participant, as workshop-giver (in 2015), and as the curator of the “Xplore Symposium” in 2016 and 2017.

5 The authors included for example, besides Caillé, Edgar Morin, who brought a distinct orientation to general/qualitative complexity in the manifesto, as well as Post-Marxist theorist of agonism Chantal Mouffe, leftist economist Yann-Moulier-Boutang, sociologist Eva Illouz, degrowth-advocate Serge Latouche, IMF-critic Susan George, and alter-globalization philosopher Patrick Viveret.

6 Relational ontologies are probably philosophically older than the substantivist ontologies that dominate Western thought since Aristotle, and they have continued to grow in the shadows of the dominant philosophical and theological discourses in Europe. But that is another discussion to have…