Queers at the End of the World

Get your Killjoy Handbook here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-feminist-killjoy-handbook-the-radical-potential-of-getting-in-the-way-sara-ahmed/19712059?ean=9781541603752

and find Sara's recommended books from UQP Press by Chelsea Watego and Eileen Moreton-Robinson at these links.

Sara Ahmed blogs at feministkilljoy.com. You can find her on twitter @SaraNAhmed and Instagram @SaraNoAhmed.

https://open.spotify.com/show/4O6MWjBArrJ5iDzoBPmf0n

https://bodyhomemaker.ohmaexhibits.org/

Bodyhome Maker is a companion project to the amazing podcast Working 2050, you can find all its episodes on any podcast app.

For the real oral history projects we talked about, visit the NYC Trans Oral History Project to listen to trans New Yorkers narrate their lives: https://nyctransoralhistory.org/

and find the Queens memory project here: https://queensmemory.org/

M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi talk with Nino about Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, their novel of oral histories that document a speculative near future of world-wide luxury communism. "Everybody in the book is queer or trans," as M.E. puts it. We talk about the erotic pleasures of mass protest, Why apocalypse movies are always destroying NYC, the political desires that created this book, and what it means to be ready for a new world just around the corner.

Find Everything for Everyone at Common Notions Press, and find M.E. O'Brien's newest book, Family Abolition, here!

Steven Universe is a huge show, so we only focus on a tiny subset of its characters and story arcs. We hope you’ll go right off and watch the entire thing. You can find it streaming on Cartoon Network or HBO, and you can find the essay we mention, by Arundhati Roy, here.

Also! This is our final episode of season two! Big changes are coming for season three, which will be back in just a few months. Meanwhile, we're thanking you with every bone in our flannel-clad bodies for supporting the show. Thanks for listening, and for sharing Queers at the End of the World with us this season!

On this QatEotW Presents we talk to Adam Garnet Jones about his short story History of the New World, from Love After the End, an Anthology of Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Speculative Fiction, edited by Joshua Whitehead, and out from Arsenal Pulp Press in 2020. Learn more about Adam and his work at adamgarnetjones.com. You can also see their gorgeous beadwork by following him on Instagram @adamgarnetjones, and learn more about APTN, the first TV network for and by indigenous people, here.

Thanks so much to the Ottawa Writers Festival for permission to use audio from their 2020 book launch for Love After the End. Check out the full event, with readings and a fantastic conversation among three of the collection’s contributors, moderated by Joshua Whitehead, editor of the anthology, and poet and fiction writer, most recently of Making Love with the Land.

Y’all! We talk poop farming, colonization, space travel and bodies, nerd masculinity and so much more. You can find the Chanda Prescod-Weinstein article that we discuss here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/becoming-martian-prescod-weinstein

and Nikki Giovanni’s “Quilting the Black Eyed Pea (We’re going to Mars)” here: https://issues.org/quilting-the-black-eyed-pea-going-to-mars-poem-giovanni/

Meanwhile, apologies for the sound quality—we had some mic snafus over the course of the recording. To lift your spirits, listen to Nino’s favorite extra-planetary spiritual (it’s true even though they misquoted it in the episode) here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSMUyUft2Zk

And for more great media recommendations related to the episode, join our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/QueersattheEndoftheWorld

This episode begins with a reading of "A New Sermon on the Warpland." Thanks to the Poetry Society of America for letting us use this audio! You can find another version of this poem in its form as digital performance here along with so many other fabulous poems and projects in computer-human hybridity at lillianyvonnebertram.com.

Queers at the End of the World is on Patreon! Click here to support the show.

Two helpful definitions for this episode! First, red-pillers are right wing conspiracy believers who use the metaphor of “getting red pilled” to talk about the idea that the world is actually controlled by women and other marginalized people (and that white men are the real victims).

Mechs or Mecha are huge creature-shaped robot suits controlled by a human fighter. You may remember them from such media as the movies Avatar and Pacific Rim, and from manga like the Gundam series.

Check out our patreon at patreon.com/queersattheendoftheworld to support the show!

Music for the trailer comes from the generous hearts at free music archive, and is Siddhartha Corsus, “Oh Radiant One” from Love Is Alive. We accessed it at: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Siddhartha/love-is-alive/oh-radiant-one

Sound effects hail from freesound.org, and you can find sources for the rest of the found audio in the trailer at these three links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgeyVE3NHJM&list=PLdkS9iEGpZ-RGIIiPHfQ877SfbyxSHfFB&index=3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BXnE9yxFFY

https://archive.org/details/RTFM-NASA-950515

Nat, Nina, Roo, Ellie, TreaAndrea, and Austen meet in the internet to imagine utopian queer post-collapse society via Avery Alder's tabletop storytelling RPG of queer strife amid the collapse, Dream Askew. Craters, trash heaps, full moon party rituals, polyamory shenanigans, and exploding sporulating puffballs ensue! 

Nat and Nina interview Avery Alder, who designs queer table top roleplaying games of monstrosity, love and community—like the acclaimed Monsterhearts 2 and the post-apocalyptic game The Quiet Year. Avery's game Dream Askew, is designed to help folks imagine what queer community looks like in a post-collapse society, and that makes it the perfect vehicle to help Queers at the End of the World put our money where our mouths are and get some of this season's guests on the show—Ellie, Austen, TreaAndrea and Roo—together to try and create a story of queer utopia in the ruins. We talk to Avery about what it's like to make queer games, what community means to her, growing up without tech and making slow connections to people, among many other things in this fantastic conversation.

In this episode, we start out talking about Station 11, the 2014 novel by Emily St. John Mandel, and end up talking about Covid, grief, and the transition into a new phase of the pandemic. Nat and Nina are joined by novelist and friend of the show A.E. Osworth in the first half of this episode as they reflect on their year and the ways Station 11 has stuck with all of us through our own experience of a world-wide plague. Find A.E. Osworth's new novel (!!!) We are Watching Eliza Bright, out now from Grand Central Publishing, wherever books and audiobooks are sold.

In this Queers at the End of the World Presents, Nat takes us through some recommendations of video games with much to say about queer identity, utopia, dystopia, and the ever popular abandoned mall. These games include Diaries of a Spaceport Janitor, Kind Words, Ooblets, and Boyfriend Dungeon and you should totally check them out. And if you're interested, you can also read Nat's Edge Effects essay on bonding with family through gaming during the pandemic.

Nat and Nina talk to DeLesslin George-Warren (aka Roo) about food sovereignty, indigi-queer language revitalization and why the heck the Keeper of the Seeds in Mad Max: Fury Road is carrying around a Basil start in a skull. Roo is an artist, researcher, and educator from Catawba Indian Nation whose work ranges from performance to installation art to community education. To follow his projects and find ways to support the work he's doing, you can check out his website at delesslin.com, or follow him on Twitter, @DeLesslin. For more on agriculture and land management among Aboriginal Australian people, check out Dark Emu: Black Seeds, by Bruce Pascoe. 

After listening, you can check out the articles we mentioned in this episode!  Mad Max: Appropriation Road was recommended by a listener, and  Mad Max: The Car and Australian Governance ties together discussions of masculinity, car culture, and indigeneity in Australia. Finally, the prison justice project Nat mentioned working for is called the Education Justice Project. It can be found at https://educationjustice.net/.

In this Queers at the End of the World Presents, poet Holly Raymond joins us to read from her work in We Want it All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics, published by Nightboat Books in 2020. We get to nerd out about poetry, goblins, slicing cold cuts at Wawa and fan translations of Final Fantasy with Holly, and she shares a bit of new work too. ALSO We Want It All is the only anthology to contain writing by both Sylvia Rivera and your co-host Nat Mesnard, who's gonna read one of their poems as well! Edited by Andrea Abi-Karam and Kay Gabriel, find it here: https://nightboat.org/book/we-want-it-all/

Mycologist Patty Kaishian and writer/educator Hasmik Djoulakian join Nina and Nat to talk about mushrooms as metaphors and creatures, non binary fungi, and the queer discipline of mycology. We talk the New Moon Mycology Summit, and the naming of the biological world. During the episode, Hasmik speaks about the violence against Armenians in Artsakh, and recommends several activist organizations where folks can learn more and offer support. These are Kooyrigs, https://kooyrigs.org/ and All for Armenia https://allforarmenia.org/

Welcome to the Apocalibrary! In this Queers at the End of the World Presents, Nina takes us through some recommendations of exciting dystopian fiction that's either authored by queer, trans or two spirit indigenous authors, or includes queer, trans, and two spirit representation. A full book list is on our website. Happy reading!

To support folks fighting that Wendigo Infrastructure right now, check out Stop Line Three at https://www.stopline3.org/#intro and Honor the Earth: https://www.honorearth.org/line_3_factsheet (which in addition to being Anishinaabe economist and activist Winona LaDuke's organization, also has queer cred as an org started in collaboration with the G-D Indigo Girls)

Poet, librarian and educator, Alison Rollins talks with Nat and Nina about survival of many kinds, including wilderness time travel, archives, and letting the birds come to you. Find Alison's book Library of Small Catastrophes with Copper Canyon Press, and find another great interview with Alison and fellow queer survivalist Latria Graham at the Poetry Podcast. Also! You can now support Queers At the End of the World on Patreon by going to patreon.com/queersattheendoftheworld. Come to support queer art, stay for a bunch more queer art!

Please note that this version of the interview is a slightly edited form of the episode we originally put out, and that’s because one of our awesome listeners from Australia got in touch to tell us that the course name for Cody Lundin’s class includes a word that is incredibly offensive there, a slur that’s used against indigenous people. We’ve taken it out of this version, because we don’t want anyone else to feel that gut punch. We do want to say that we’re super grateful to the person who called us in about it. This show is a relationship with you, each other, and our guests, and that means we really, really hope that if any of you listeners is ever like, do Nat and Nina want to know that this thing they said caused me pain? Or do Nat and Nina want to know that something they said stands to harm folks I care about? The answer is yes. We want to know. And we’ll be grateful anytime we’re given a chance to try and repair. Send us a message if you want to talk, and thanks for listening!

Our first QatEotW Presents! Join us for a snippet of our interview on queer camps and the history of camping with Juniper Lewis, then check out their article: Queer Camping, Then and Now. For more on camping and whiteness, Juniper recommends Black Faces, White Spaces by Carolyn Finney. Also! Also! Queers at the End of the World has a Patreon where we're putting great new content—like the rest of our interview with Juniper on video game environments. Come see us!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/QueersattheEndoftheWorld?fan_landing=true

Anchor: https://anchor.fm/queerworlds/support

Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain are two classics of YA survivalist fiction. Nat and Nina talk about freedom, masculinity, and the gamification of survival in the context of the post-apocalyptic landscape of colonized America. While you're listening today, check out the NDN Collective, supporting landback campaigns and movements for indigenous rights across the U.S., here and at @ndncollective on Instagram. You can also check out the Land Reparations and Indigenous Solidarity Toolkit from the good folks at movement generation here, with links to several land reparations movements and other sovereignty campaigns.