Nóra Ugron

In this paper, I analyse the practices and writings of the queer-feminist literary circle Cenaclul X from Romania, arguing that they enact imaginations of possible transformative queer Eastern European worlds. In order to analyze these, I look at how hegemonic ideas of Eastern Europe were constructed by West(ern Europe) and trace possible directions to unsettle these imaginaries in literary-activist practices. I borrow the idea ‘queer as corrupt’ to present an Eastern European corrupt a/temporality that disturbs the hegemony of modern-colonial Time on imaginaries of Eastern Europe, and to present a corrupted version of Eastern European queerness, one that is not feeding into liberal respectability politics. To exemplify these, the paper engages in theory driven close reading on several fragments from the first two literary anthologies published by Cenaclul X: Adăposturi. Antologie queer [Shelters. Queer anthology, 2021] and Luminișuri. Antologie de literatură queer ecologică Meadows/Clearings. Queer ecological anthology, 2022].

This paper is an unfolding dialogue filled with questions and half-answers between three activists and engaged researchers from Eastern Europe, looking into the connections between different social movements, building internationalist solidarity and the possibility of (total) liberation. We think through issues such as the hegemony of what counts as politically relevant in a globalized world, the overrepresentation of Man following Sylvia Wynter, pain and grief in the face of current (social and ecological) crises and joining the fights for human and animal liberation. Drawing from feminist, queer, antispeciesist and Indigenous theories, as well as from our personal experiences, this exchange sinuously follows the question: What is to be done to always already facilitate the process of blooming into queer, decolonial and antispeciesist worlds?

We are currently experiencing a planetary crisis that will lead, if worst comes to worst, to the end of the entire world as we know it. Several feminist scholars have suggested that if the Earth is to stay livable for humans and nonhumans alike, the ways in which many human beings – particularly in the wealthy parts of the world, infested with Eurocentrism, colonialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism – inhabit this planet requires radical, ethical, and political transformation. In this article, we propose that feminist theory, particularly feminist posthumanities, and Black feminist and decolonial thought, together with creative practices such as writing, have much to contribute to transformative planetary activism that imagines different and other kinds of worlds and futures based on an ethical consideration of nonhuman others and collective caring for the planet.