Death Activism: Queer Death Studies and the Posthuman (Posthumanism in Practice)

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.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University, UK. She is the author of The Ahuman Manifesto (Bloomsbury, 2020), Posthuman Ethics (2012), and Cinesexuality (2008).

Matt Hayler is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Danielle Sands is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK.

Christine Daigle is Professor of Philosophy at Brock University, Canada, where she is also Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute.