Panel: Queer Thanatology: Theories, Definitions & New Directions
Sept 1-4 2021
Panel proposal
Queer Thanatology: Theories, Definitions, and New Directions
Proposed by Mattia Petricola (University of L’Aquila, Italy)
Queer death studies has recently emerged as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry investigating the cultural performances related to death, dying, grief, and disposal from the perspective of queer theory. This panel explores some of the major directions in which queer thanatology is currently developing in such fields as queer theory, philosophy, media studies, cultural history, and the environmental humanities.
This panel includes papers by Marietta Radomska, Nina Lykke, Mél Hogan, and Mattia Petricola.
***
The Promise of a Queer Afterlife: a Counter-proposal to Preserving Normative Singularities in the Cloud // Mél Hogan (University of Calgary)
Abstract: “The Promise of a Queer Afterlife: a Counter-proposal to Preserving Normative Singularities in the Cloud” looks at Big Tech fantasies about preserving humans in a digital afterlife, in part, as illustrated in the television series Black Mirror, Upload and Forever. Through these shows, we come to see how pop culture, science, and technology favour imaginaries centering the uploading individuals as ‘singularities’ and fail to address and account for complex queer intimacies that have the potential to make the afterlife relational, collective, and imbricated with nature and non-human life. As an intervention into the broader topic of ‘Queer Death’, this piece offers a critique of the normativity enforced in the living realm, with all possibilities for queer desire being reserved for death, and, in some cases, reckoned with only in dark corners of an already nebulous afterlife.
Bio: Dr. Mél Hogan is Director of the Environmental Media Lab (EML) and Associate Professor in Communication, Media and Film, University of Calgary (Canada). Dr. Hogan’s research is situated in Critical Studies of the Cloud: Big Tech fantasies about the ‘code of life’ (genomics) and the ‘code of death’ (digital afterlives).
