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Finalist, 2026 Lammy Awards: LGBTQ+ Studies, given by Lambda Literary
What queer modes of resilience and care can teach us about enduring environmental collapse
What does it mean to live at the end of life, the end of a family line, the end of a species, or the end of the future itself? When faced with unfurling catastrophes, environmentalists often limit the conversation by focusing on the future. Activists work for the welfare of future generations, while scientists labor over projections of future outcomes. In Queer Lasting, Sarah Ensor asks what this emphasis on the future makes unthinkable. She looks to queer scenes of futurelessness to consider what ecocriticism can learn from queer theory, which imagines and inhabits the immanent ethical possibilities of a terminal present. While living “at the last” is often a terrifying prospect, queer culture reminds us that “to last” is itself also one way to go on.
Defining queerness as a mode of collective life in which these paradigms of lasting—ending and persisting—are constitutively intertwined, Ensor turns to two periods of queer extinction for models of care, continuance, and collective action predicated on futurelessness: the 1890s, in which existing forms of erotic affiliation were extinguished through the binary of homo/heterosexuality, and the 1980s, in which the spread of the AIDS epidemic threatened the total loss of gay lives and of specific erotic ways of life. Through readings that trace unexpected formal resonances across the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, Melvin Dixon, Essex Hemphill, Allen Barnett, and Samuel Delany, Queer Lasting maintains that queer writing, in its intimacy with death and loss, offers a rich archive for imagining new ways of thinking through environmental collapse. Whether confronting the epidemic contours of the AIDS crisis, theorizing the temporary encounters of cruising, or reckoning with the lives of non-reproductive subjects, this book about futurelessness is also a book about persistence. It demonstrates how, far from giving up in the face of the terminal paradigms that environmentalism fears, queer culture has instead predicated its living—and its lasting—upon them.
"Thought-provoking, timely. This compelling, evocative book expertly centers queer writing and resilience to imagine new approaches to living during environmental crises."
"Queer Lasting is built around a lightning-bright insight: that queer writing, with its many-shaded intimacy with terminality, can help us better grasp the staggered terrors of environmental cataclysm. Ensor gives us new horizons for thinking endurance, invention, ends – as well as a luminous account of the lasting clarities of queer loss, queer theory, and queer love."
"A beautifully written book. Queer Lasting is enormously creative and manages to balance innovation of composition, form, and inquiry with indefatigable rigor of argumentation and marshalling of evidence. Sarah Ensor’s unique temporal focus allows us access to a set of political and ethical questions about the present force of kinship and connection"
"I’ve never smashed the preorder button faster than I did for this book. As climate increasingly becomes the only thing I can think about, I’ve been obsessed with studying queer ecology, so this book couldn’t have come at a more perfect time."
"Poignant and extremely timely... the wonderful complexity of [Ensor's] thinking, the gentle touch of her prose, and the depth of her formalist analysis [mean] a book like Queer Lasting needs to be read in full, and possibly more than once."
"An intricate, creative study of a vast world that exists behind the idea of futurity... rife with detail and tenderness... a love letter to queer persistence, literature, worldmaking, theory, and colleagues."