[ MANIFESTO ] For centuries, humans thought about themselves as distinct and superior to animals and other non-human creatures, as single entities that are above anything else. But instead of one single entity, we are a multiplicity of beings and of becomings. We are the bacteria, the fungi, and the parasites that live in our bodies – we are complex biological, technological, and political assemblages made up of hundreds of thousands of different microorganisms. And microplastics. We are used to the idea of penetrative sex and our bodies penetrating other bodies, or other bodies penetrating us, but what happens when we think about our bodies as being penetrated by plastic particles, one cell after another, deep inside? Pollution and hydrospheric climate change are not only changing our bodies and sexualities, but also the bodies and sexualities of our non-human comrades.
In a time where more and more people identify as asexual, maybe the time has come to learn from our marine/terrestrial friends? Life on earth exists because of asexual reproduction, which is also the dominant form of reproduction within the human ecology. Even our cells reproduce asexually. What if we could, too? For centuries, we’ve been so obsessed with our own bodies and sexualities, that we didn’t notice that which is all around us. It’s high time to finally put a stop to the assumed heterosexuality of human and non-human beings and turn towards queer potentiality – to ‘queer’ nature is to acknowledge the complexities present in nature and to rid interpretations of nature from human assumptions. It is to disrupt prevailing heterosexist discursive and institutional articulations of sexuality and nature and to reimagine evolutionary processes, ecological interactions, and environmental politics in light of sexual and gender diversity.
What can we learn from Ginkgo biloba trees, aquatic sea snails, or Pyura chilensis? Exploring their subsequent worlds, as well as many other ‘posthuman’ worlds, we are hoping to discover their beauty in the world of our own. Have we ever been human? Have we ever been queer, if queerness is the future’s domain? Probably no one will ever put it so poetically as the late José Esteban Muñoz: “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward. (…) It is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.” And this is how we see the aim of this collective undertaking that is Post-sexual Futures: Towards Queer Non-humanisms…
Through Post-sexual Futures: Towards Queer Non-humanisms we are inviting you to open up your porous, nanoplastics-infused bodies to all kinds of queer possibilities. To reinvent yourself anew, speculate on potential futures, and reimagine new worlds. In the end, maybe imagination is the only thing that’s left?