Artist Jean-Ulrick Désert in conversation with Renan Laru-an

The phrase ‘queer waste’ evokes a volley of disparate themes and images, ranging from queerness’ potential anti-reproductivity, to aesthetics that might be understood as trashy or campy, to panics about changes in gender or sex caused by the presence within ecosystems of toxicity and pollutants. More broadly, ‘queer waste’ indexes the entwinement of waste as pollution with the lives of queer people—a relation often coded by the afterlives of industrial colonialism perpetuated by global capital. In this way, ‘queer waste’ suggests a geographical orientation through which both queer bodies and lived environments cast a light on racial and carceral capital. The diverse mechanisms through which this manifests range from the corralling of underprivileged communities into so-called ‘cancer alleys’—areas in which plants emit hazardous chemicals posing heightened risk to residents’ health—to the revaluation and repurposing of electronic waste—rapidly piling-up discarded electric equipment—in certain Global South areas including in India, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire.

This symposium brings together scholars, artists, and members of the public to explore how such entanglements play out and are resisted and reimagined in both theoretical and fictional worlds, via film, the visual arts, literature, and scholarship.