Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Philosophy (Ph.D)

Department

English

First Advisor

Steve Mentz

Second Advisor

Kathleen Lubey

Third Advisor

Nicole Rice

Abstract

“Posthuman Queer Ecosexuality” explores the culminating productivity of a queer landscape fertilized by dead bodies. Tragedy as a genre provides a higher queer possibility simply because it does not contend with picture perfect happy endings. By seeing an inherent connection between queerness and death, the paired couples of the specific Shakespearean tragedies explored in this project, King Lear (1605), Othello (1604), and Antony and Cleopatra (1607), fertilize the respective landscapes within their plots. These main six characters are queered by forced connections to nature due to their gender, race, or function as a ruling body. Once they are placed in these positions, their bodies take on a more than human quality, so that their deaths become a consummation between body and ecology. Utilizing José Esteban Muñoz’s queer futurity and Lee Edelman’s no future, this project reads the finality of human death as a compost metaphor which creates intimacy and pleasure through each play’s endings.

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