Cruising the Monument: Funerary Flowers, Queer Ecologies, and the Small Pleasures of Remembrance

Guest Chair and Respondent: Dr Naomi Booth (University of Durham) 

What might happen if - rather like compulsory heterosexuality, or compulsory whiteness, or compulsory ableism - we choose to refuse the monumental? If all monuments are erected as a gesture of desired domination and supremacy, an assertion of (or wrestling for) control by one group - no matter its politics - over another, then how can we achieve a monumental remembrance without taking hostages? The monumental will always contain, conceal, and encrypt a necropolitical other, a shadow that urges us to question who or what is not being represented, who or what is unable to dwell in power, and what value (market or otherwise) can be ascribed to that necropolitical other, a subaltern who is left permanently ghostly. Monuments and memorials cast grey shadows. They mark where terror and counterterror did and do occur. They can also become agents of terror and counterterror themselves, drawn irresistibly into a discourse that they shape, part of what Achille Mbembe calls ‘an immense therapeutic liturgy’. This talk will take examples from yew trees, Eve Sedgwick, Derek Jarman, and contemporary queer artists, to explore what it means as LGBTQIA+ subjects, to dwell in power, to monumentalise outside of heteronormative, supremacist structures of power. I will examine a form of queer monumentality that is rooted, not in the ephemerality so closely seized upon as ‘anti-monumental’, but rather in a deeper ecological time that isn’t antirelational, but seeks to form new relationality through organisms existing in different temporalities to our own. I therefore seek to separate out the difference between a monument or memorial representative of an LGBTQIA+ constituency and a monument - or more specifically a monumental being - that disrupts anthropocentric time altogether.

Thomas Houlton is an academic, writer, and editor based in York, UK. Educated at the University of Cambridge and New York University, he gained his PhD from the University of Sussex, where he also worked at the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. He has had both critical and creative writing published in journals and magazines and his monograph, Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects, was published by Routledge in 2021. He is currently an Associate Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of York. 

Naomi Booth is a fiction writer and academic. She completed her PhD at the University of Sussex, where she researched the literary history of swooning. This inspired her first work of fiction, The Lost Art of Sinking, an experimental novella about a character who compulsively passes out, and her recent monograph, Swoon: A Poetics of Passing Out (Manchester University Press, 2021), which attempts to theorise the swoon as representation and literary response. She is the author of the novels Sealed and Exit Management, and the forthcoming short story collection, Animals at Night. She was named a Guardian ‘Fresh Voice’ and listed in fiction books of the year (2020), and her work has received a Saboteur Award, been longlisted for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, and anthologised in Best British Short Stories. She is Associate Professor in English Studies at Durham University.