As a queer person with no interest in raising children, I feel a personal stake in Sarah Ensor’s conception of avuncular futurity—an ecological perspective grounded in “nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figures” (410). Ensor’s “spinster stands in a kind of slanted or oblique relationship to the linear, vertical paradigms of transmission that govern familiar notions of futurity” (416). As the strange aunt of the future, the spinster reminds us of contingencies, paths not taken, alternate relations, networks of non-linear being. Reading Ensor, I felt invited to imagine myself as the future’s confirmed bachelor uncle. And yet I wonder now if that is quite right. The spinster is, after all, specifically female and exclusively so in Ensor’s paper.

The spinster, we might say, is legible as a kind of social outsider precisely insofar as she has been abstracted from time. She becomes a spinster only once it has been determined that she likely has no marriageable future; when that happens, however, she also comes to have no past—or at least no past in which a future, or the desire for one, ever existed. (We need think here only of the oddly virginal resonances of the phrase old maid, which erases the spinster’s lived past in favor of a kind of ahistorical, perpetual innocence. (414)

It is the gendered social expiration date that in part enables the spinster’s out-of-time perspective and role. There is no male correlate to “old maid.” (Interesting that there is too no aunt correlate to avuncular.) Indeed, the winking “confirmed bachelor” suggests not a misfortune that befalls but a choice, a willful headlong orientation toward the (childless) future. Wikipedia offers a little serendipity here. “Confirmed Bachelor” redirects to an article called “He never married,” which is described as “a code phrase used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.” With “he never married,” often the last words of an obituary, the subject is identified as queer at the same time that he is written out of the present and the future. These are final words that relegate queerness to a past that is dead and disconnected. My point with this response is not to discredit or even really critique Ensor’s spinster futurity. Rather, I wonder what other kinds of queer futurity we might find that, like Ensor’s, reject or remediate the antisocial turn in queer scholarship. Further I think highlighting gender makes clear the feminist potential in Ensor’s work for opening modes of female futurity that do not depend on reproductive capacity. Spinster futurity, in resisting “do it for the children” kinds of environmental discourse with its oblique perspective, also opens up space to think about complex, slow, or cumulative environmental happenings outside of a neat chain of causality. In this way it seems almost the perfect match for orienting ourselves with respect to Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence, perhaps unsurprising given both authors’ indebtedness to Rachel Carson.

In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway offers another reorientation toward the environmental future. Her troubled and troubling conception of the Chthulucene is similarly aligned with resistance to simple cause and effect environmentalism. Haraway’s exigence more than anything seems to be a profound awareness of limits—the limits of our ways of thinking, the limits of our narratives, the limits of our power as individuals and as a species. Haraway’s sympoietic tentacular chthonic Gaia is so impossibly complex that thinking only about one actor, element, or problem is laughably inadequate. She implicitly questions what the goal of environmentalism should be. It cannot end, she seems suggest; the chthonic ones laugh in the face of discrete goals. Her sense of a world that becomes-with is intimately connected to the Chthulucene: “an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names” (51). I sense that it is no accident that her Chthulucene resists easy definition; in the time of the Chthulucene, present, future, and past seem to lose relevance to a billion different distributed and interdependent nows. Haraway’s embrace of “kin” over kids, a benign anti-natalism, is grounded in this profound sense of interconnectedness of time and effects as much as it is in a sense of “response-ability” for overpopulation.  In her introduction, Haraway articulates her resistance to the conception of a discrete future that leads to faith in technofixes or a sense of our efforts being “too late.” That latter futurity has a real danger of paralyzing activism. Haraway has done something remarkable in being able to overcome that panic without losing a sense of the urgency for action.

As in Ensor, I sense a potential in Haraway’s reorientation of the future to be able to better understand and represent slow violence. Indeed, slow violence seems positively tentacular. Taken together, Ensor and Haraway persuasively make a case for an alternative futurity being almost a pre-requisite for negotiating a less destructive relationship with the environment and, as Haraway suggests, moving us out of the Capitalocene (or perhaps the Neo-Liberalocene).

(“Future is so Queer” by Eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)