Death Activism: Queer Death Studies and the Posthuman

Traditional Western attitudes towards death deal with it as a painful inevitability, something that has to be navigated as a trauma and a taboo. They focus essentially on the 'management' of death, an anthropocentric practice prioritising the human life above every other type of existence.

Patricia MacCormack explores how we can develop a 'death activism' – a variety of tactics and posthuman practices which celebrate death, its inevitability, its forms, from the slow to times of crisis, and how trauma and mourning emerge as their own forms of expression. Crucial to the foundation of death activism is the dissymmetry with which different deaths are met including the mass death of nonhuman animals and ecologies.

Death Activism is a feminist, queer, postcolonialist enquiry, that seeks to queer death – making queer our usual familiar death habits and trajectories of thought, toward a jubilant activism that can transform death into a more democratically equal, and a more jubilant force for life.