UCLA

Fruit Flux blends performative language, queer auto-ethnographic methods and traditional research citations. The text studies speculative narrative strategies by highlighting relational details within social and physical interactions after a fictive catastrophic planetary event. Of the need for speculation in order to shift systemic harm, Jones & Harris have written that queer futurity emerges from the refusal to “remain unmoved by the systematic loss of human and other life...”1 This project is concerned with producing rhetorical possibilities for unknowing the transmission systems of hate. To do this, it utilizes ethical and corporeal conjunctions to speak compassionately to scales of self-destruction ranging from individual to ecological. Investigating performative approaches to scholarship also generates new trajectories for art research in relation to bodily and collective ways of knowing and the collision of text and artistic inquiry.

Methodologically, a performance studies approach considers how aesthetic modalities are useful for intervening upon larger social scales to propose tactics for transformation of cultural inequities. To this end, chapters integrate non-Western, Buddhist praxes of non-harm to explore the recent emergence of explicit critical discussions around interdependence in apparently disparate fields. This critical interdisciplinary dialogue beneath the fiction includes: queer and disability studies, social justice approaches to suicide prevention within Critical Suicidology and Peace Studies. Fruit Flux’s investigation of interdependence points humanistic concern towards the contemporary perils of extinction, suicide and despair– redirecting both environmental exploitation and the formation of distorted self-regard towards alternative performances of irreverent joy and impromptu care.

1 Jones, Stacy Holman and Anne M. Harris. “Queering Massacres.” Queering Autoethnography, Routledge, 2019, p. 34.