READING QUEER KINSHIP IN THE AGE OF ECOLOGY: ON HUMAN-NONHUMAN INTERRELATEDNESS IN 21ST CENTURY QUEER NARRATIVES

Abstract

This thesis heeds Donna Haraway's call to "make kin in lines of inventive connection" and finds that kinmaking strategies practiced by queer subjects are particularly helpful in the formations of such human-nonhuman interrelatedness and interdependency. Borrowing from recent scholarship done by queer theorists such as Elizabeth Freeman, Tyler Bradway and others, as well as ecological theorists such as Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Haraway and others, this thesis delineates alternative and innovative forms of kinship in 21st-century queer narratives such as Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Daniels' Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Larrisa Lai's Salt Fish Girl to foreground the salient ecological notion that humans and nonhumans are, in fact, of the same kind rather than being ontologically different, a notion that is crucial to the cultivation of ecological hope and futures within and beyond our current epoch of ecological crisis.