Queer and Feminist Care Practices at the End of The World


Sarah Law, Simon Fraser University

As Lauren Berlant writes, crisis has become ordinary (2011). Learning to live with impending catastrophe is a defining characteristic of our historical moment. As climate impacts worsen, ecological grief (eco grief) grows in the place of hope for the future. Feelings of despair, anger, stress, fear and hopelessness intensify alongside rising sea levels, wildfires, droughts, and air quality advisory warnings. Most notably developed by Ashlee Cunsolo and co-authours, eco grief is currently understood as a psychological response to the loss experienced and anticipated due to climate change. However, feelings of “world-ending” are not new –– they have long plagued marginalized peoples whose lands are occupied by settler states, climate refugees and migrants, and populations who have experienced mass deaths from preventable diseases. As they come to the forefront of concern for the Global North, the political feelings associated with existential dread, death, and dying have become popularized. Related terms such as solastalgia, eco anxiety, eco dread, and climate anxiety have lacked conceptual clarity, often resulting in interchangeable use and an urge within the social sciences to define and delineate. I offer an understanding of eco grief through feminist theories of affect as a socio-politically and culturally informed response to the climate crisis moving through phases of (1) fear and urgency (2) denial and overwhelm (3) frustration and bargaining (4) despair and depression (5) anger and rage. I frame eco grief as a continuous cycle of practice: an embodied response that moves, informs, and shapes how we come to understand the climate crisis as a consequence of settler colonial occupation and neoliberal capitalism. In this model, eco grief surfaces as a political feeling that mourns environmental loss, hopes for the future, and disrupts deeply held beliefs about our social realities. I develop this paper based on my undergraduate honours thesis Resistance and Resilience in the Era of Ecological Grief (2022) interview data with climate justice activists in “Vancouver”, designed with a desire-based framework (Tuck, 2009) and the radical imagination (Marcuse, 1972). Through dreaming up just climate futures and identifying the obstacles that impede materializing these visions, I look to the sociality of emotion as a cycle that is active—that moves and points us to structural failures. In this conceptualization, eco grief is a more-than-individual phenomenon. As such, this paper frames grief not as a journey towards acceptance, but as a social practice that holds the multitude of emotions that overlap and shape our grief; inclusive of a loss of hope, faith in market-based solutions, resentment against settler institutions, frustration with political inaction, and the betrayals of corporate greenwashing. To intervene in the neoliberal imperative to turn inwards and towards the self, I argue for using theories of affect to understand climate emotions during this critical moment. Feminist theories of affect provide frameworks for analyzing the object of our emotions, allowing us to better understand what our emotions do rather than what they are. In this paper, I emphasize the importance of moving towards a conceptualization of feeling that attends to power relations, resists pathologizing political feelings, and re-politicizes mental health beyond liberal wellness and therapeutic practices.

This paper will be presented at the following session: