Burning Hope: Staging Queer Ecology in a Time of Wildfire

Abstract

This article analyzes three contemporary plays by trans and gender-non-conforming artists from the United States that engage with forest fires and queer ecology. These three plays - MJ Kaufman's Sagittarius Ponderosa, Agnes Borinsky's The Trees, and Kari Barclay's How to Live in a House on Fire - tie wildfire to colonial histories of fire suppression and imagine a just climate transition as linked to queer and trans self-reinvention. The article describes this dramaturgical tactic as 'burning hope' - letting go of straight, settler desire and gesturing toward reciprocal obligation with the non-human world. Building on Kim TallBear's call to attend to organic matter and Stephen Pyne's study of fire history in the 'Pyrocene', the article imagines theatre as a prescribed burn that can re-orient audience relations to futurity. Burning hope does not abandon hope; it recognizes grief as mobilization for environmentalist solidarities.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Publication Date

11-1-2024

Publication Title

New Theatre Quarterly

Department

Theater

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X24000320

Keywords

Fire, Anthropocene, Pyrocene, Trans theatre, Ecocriticism, Climate change, Environmentalist theatre

Language

English

Format

text

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