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Introduction: Researching Queer Death
Mattia Petricola
2021, Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies
October 31, 2025
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Abstract
The present article serves as an introduction to the dossier What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. This introduction briefly interrogates the premises, scope, and objectives of Queer Death Studies (QDS) in such a way as to complement the views expressed by the contributors to this collection. I will begin to discuss the premises on which QDS are based in a preamble focused on Italo Calvino's book Mr. Palomar. Section one will provide a more systematic and analytical perspective on these same premises. I will move on to reconstruct some crucial moments in the genealogy of QDS in Section two and conclude by sketching a research program for QDS in Section three.
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WHAT
A Transdisciplinary
Journal of
Queer
Theories and Studies
EVER
whatever.cirque.unipi.it
Mattia Petricola
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
Abstract: The present article serves as an introduction to the dossier What do we talk about
when we talk about queer death?, edited by M. Petricola. This introduction briefly interrogates the
premises, scope, and objectives of Queer Death Studies (QDS) in such a way as to complement
the views expressed by the contributors to this collection. I will begin to discuss the premises on
which QDS are based in a preamble focused on Italo Calvino’s book Mr. Palomar. Section one
will provide a more systematic and analytical perspective on these same premises. I will move on
to reconstruct some crucial moments in the genealogy of QDS in Section two and conclude by
sketching a research program for QDS in Section three.
Keywords: thanatology; death studies; queer theory; identity; category theory.
The six-part dossier to which these few pages serve as an introduction
attempts to map some regions of the area of inquiry that sits at the cross-
roads of death studies (or thanatology) and queer studies. The multi-au-
thored articles that follow, each made up of five to seven short essays, are
meant to be read by (and accessible to) scholars from both these fields.
They aim to give the reader an idea of what kind of questions one might
address when researching queer death and what theories, methods, and
hermeneutical tools one might adopt when answering those questions. The
articles’ titles (1/ Theories and definitions; 2/ LGBTQ+ necropolitics; 3/ Queer-
ing death beyond the human; 4/ Queering death in the medical and health
humanities; 5/ Writing and filming queer deaths; 6/ New perspectives in queer
death studies) already provide a preliminary map of the field.
The present introduction will not summarize the contents of the dossier
– this task is covered by the articles’ abstracts. Rather, it will try to briefly
interrogate the premises, scope, and objectives of Queer Death Studies
(abbreviated from now on as QDS) in such a way as to complement the
views expressed by the contributors to this collection. I will begin to dis-
cuss the premises on which QDS are based in a preamble focused on Italo
Calvino’s book Mr. Palomar. Section one will provide a more systematic
[email protected]
Whatever, 4 2021: 563-572 | CC 4.0 BY NC-SA
University of L’Aquila doi 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v4i1.XXX
Mattia Petricola
and analytical perspective on these same premises. I will move on to recon-
struct some crucial moments in the genealogy of QDS in Section two and
conclude by sketching a research program for QDS in Section 3.
Preamble: learning to be dead
This preamble draws its title from the last chapter of Italo Calvino’s 1983
collection of short fictions Mr. Palomar, in which the protagonist “decides
that from now on he will act as if he were dead, to see how the world gets
along without him” (Calvino 1999 [1983]: 108). Mr. Palomar soon begins
to discover that “being dead is less easy than it might seem” (Ibidem). How
should he think about his relation with the world of the living? How is
he supposed to conceptualize his afterlife identity? How should he define
himself? And in relation to who/what?
The dead should no longer give a damn about anything because it is not up to
them to think about it any more; and even if that may seem immoral, it is in this
irresponsibility that the dead find their gaiety (110).
The problem is not the change in what he does but in what he is, or more specif-
ically in what he is as far as the world is concerned. Before, by “world” he meant
the world plus himself; now it is a question of himself plus the world minus him
(109).
So he might as well get used to it: for Palomar, being dead means resigning him-
self to the disappointment in finding himself the same in a definitive state, which
he can no longer hope to change (110).
Therefore Palomar prepares to become a grouchy dead man, reluctant to submit
to the sentence to remain exactly as he is; but he is unwilling to give up anything
of himself, even if it is a burden (125).
This train of thought, in the end, takes Palomar further and further beyond
his death. Firstly, he contemplates the extinction of the human species,
then he travels to the end of time itself:
Thinking of his own death, Palomar already thinks of that of the last survivors of
the human species or of its derivations or heirs. On the terrestrial globe, devas-
tated and deserted, explorers from another planet land; they decipher the clues
recorded in the hieroglyphics of the pyramids and in the punched cards of the
Whatever | 564 | 4 • 2021
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
electronic calculators; the memory of the human race is reborn from its ashes
and is spread through the inhabited zones of the universe. And so, after one
postponement or another, the moment comes when it is time to wear out and be
extinguished in an empty sky, when the last material evidence of the memory of
living will degenerate in a flash of heat, or will crystallize its atoms in the chill of
an immobile order (125).
Mr. Palomar’s musings might seem a little more than an idle, quint-
essentially post-modern conceptual game. However, behind them lies an
only apparently absurd question that could serve as a crucial starting point
for QDS as an intellectual and critical project: how do we learn to be dead?
This question, in turn, might be broken up into sub-questions as: how
do we learn to categorize someone as dead? What does categorizing some-
one as dead imply (for us as individuals, for a group of people, for a whole
culture)? How do we learn to rethink our identity and the identities of
others when they begin to shift from life to death? How do we learn to
acknowledge death?
1 Queer, death, queer death: some theoretical premises
Death is not a natural event. This might appear as a provocative statement;
in fact, this is the basic premise of a number of schools of thought within
the field of thanatology. If we think of death as natural, we fail to acknowl-
edge that death is, first and foremost, a social construct whose shape and
structure change endlessly across time and space. Attaching an adjective to
the word ‘death’ – natural, biological, universal, necessary, among count-
less others – often (always?) implies inscribing death within a system of
knowledge, that is, according to Michel Foucault, within a system of power.
If we think of death as an event, we fail to acknowledge the process of dying
and, in more general terms, the different temporalities along which dying,
death, mourning, and disposal unfold.
Since the primary aim of every social construct is that of categorizing the
individuals of a given social group by assigning identities to them, the word
“dead” can be said to refer to a social identity – whose exact structure and
implications, once again, change dramatically from one culture to another.
According to queer death studies, identities are not simply and passively
possessed, but rather actively performed by the members of a social group.
One needs to learn how to enact, embody, and recognize an identity – all
Whatever | 565 | 4 • 2021
Mattia Petricola
activities which, in turn, require knowledge and training. As an intellectual
and critical endeavor, queer studies can be seen as based not only on the
premise that identities are performances, but also on the idea that every
identity construct should be problematized and deconstructed. From this
perspective, queer studies and LGBTQ+ studies are not synonyms. In the
words of Carmen Dell’Aversano, queer
does not simply maintain that it is OK to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender
[…] but states that any construction of identity (including LGBT ones) is a perfor-
mance constituting a subject which does not “exist” prior to it, and encourages to
bring into being (both as objects of desire, of fantasy and of theoretical reflection
and as concrete existential and political possibilities) alternative modes of perfor-
mance (2010: 74-75).
Adopting an analogously wide and inclusive framework, Radomska, Meh-
rabi and Lykke (2019) define queer death studies as a field
addressing issues of death, dying, mourning and afterlife in a queering, relent-
lessly norm-critical mode, questioning ontologies, epistemologies and ethics, as
well as bio- and necropolitical agendas, while affirmatively looking for alterna-
tives (5).
In more concrete terms, this means that
QDS attends, among other things, to issues of diverse historical, cultural, social,
political and economic conditions; to the entangled relations between human
and nonhuman others in the current context of planetary environmental disrup-
tion; and to the differential experiences of marginalised communities, groups and
individuals who are excluded from hegemonic stories and discourses on death,
dying, grief and mourning (Radomska, Mehrabi & Lykke 2020: 88).
From a methodological perspective, as conceptualized by Radomska, Meh-
rabi and Lykke, QDS are based on the idea that “death becomes meaningful
in terms of assemblages (Deleuze & Guattari 2004) and intra-actions
(Barad 2007)”.
By looking at this description of QDS in the light of the premises that I
posited earlier, QDS could be framed, in general terms, as a field tackling
such questions as (among many others): which power-knowledge systems
arrogate to themselves the right to situate the members of a given culture
Whatever | 566 | 4 • 2021
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
along the life-death continuum? In other words, who owns this contin-
uum? Who decides how to structure and define it? Which performances
contribute to defining and structuring the identities along this continuum?
What happens if someone (or something) cannot or does not want to adhere
to these performances and identities?
In this sense, QDS can be defined as a hermeneutic stance aimed at
problematizing and deconstructing the identities that define death, dying,
mourning, and disposal within a given social group by analyzing the per-
formances on which these identities depend. I will explore the implications
of this definition later on; first, I will briefly investigate the origins of QDS.
2 Where do Queer Death Studies come from?
Obviously, the definitions of QDS formulated by Radomska, Mehrabi, and
Lykke between 2019 and 2020 did not emerge from a vacuum. Scholars
and activists have been working at the intersection of thanatology and
queer at least since the 1980s. As the contributions that follow will prove
extensively, a seminal text for queer theory like Leo Bersani’s Is the rectum
a grave? can be considered, without hesitation, a pioneering work of QDS.
Originally written as a review of Watney 1987, Bersani’s essay dialogues
with Foucault’s history of sexuality, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality, and the theory of BDSM in order to study
what might be called a frenzied epic of displacements in the discourse on sexual-
ity and on AIDS. The government [...] is more interested in those who may even-
tually be threatened by AIDS than in those stricken with it. There are hospitals in
which concern for the safety of patients who have not been exposed to HIV takes
precedence over caring for those suffering from an AIDS-related disease. Atten-
tion is turned away from the kinds of sex people practice to a moralistic discourse
about promiscuity. The impulse to kill gays comes out as a rage against gay kill-
ers deliberately spreading a deadly virus among the “general public” (Bersani
1987: 220).
Drawing on Watney’s notion of the rectum as grave, Bersani embraces a
disruptive, antisocial, apocalyptic view of the relation between queerness
and death by affirming that
if the rectum is the grave in which the masculine ideal (an ideal shared – differ-
ently – by men and women) of proud subjectivity is buried, then it should be
Whatever | 567 | 4 • 2021
Mattia Petricola
celebrated for its very potential for death. Tragically, AIDS has literalized that
potential as the certainty of biological death, and therefore reinforced the hetero-
sexual association of anal sex with a self-annihilation originally and primarily
identified with the fantasmatic mystery of an insatiable, unstoppable female sex-
uality. It may, finally, be in the gay man’s rectum that he demolishes his own per-
haps otherwise uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against
him (222).
Such an apocalyptic view of queer death has been revived, from a Freud-
ian-Lacanian perspective, by Lee Edelman in another classic of queer the-
ory, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004).
Fundamental contributions to the field that we define today as QDS
were also provided by another key figure for the development of queer
studies like Judith Butler, who posited one of the main theoretical tenets of
QDS in Precarious Life (2004):
[s]ome lives are grievable, and others are not; the differential allocation of griev-
ability that decides what kind of subject is and must be grieved, and which kind
of subject must not, operates to produce and maintain certain exclusionary con-
ceptions of who is normatively human: what counts as a livable life and a griev-
able death? (XIV-XV)
One year before the publication of Precarious Life, postcolonial thinker
Achille Mbembe (2003) had coined terms like “necropolitics”, “necropower”,
and “death-worlds”, that is, “new and unique forms of social existence in
which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon
them the status of the living dead” (Mbembe 2019 [2016]: 92). Formulated
in the context of postcolonial studies, Mbembe’s theory has become an
essential part of QDS’ theoretical arsenal (see, for example, Haritaworn,
Kuntsman & Posocco 2014).
These are just a few examples of how we could investigate and recon-
struct the cultural genealogy (or, rather, the cultural genealogies) of QDS in
all their richness and plurality. Attempting to draw such genealogies could
indeed be a major task in the context of a research program for QDS. In the
next and final section, I will focus on what this research program might
look like.
Whatever | 568 | 4 • 2021
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
Notes towards a research program for Queer Death
Studies
Defining QDS as the project of problematizing and deconstructing the iden-
tities that define death, dying, mourning, and disposal within a given social
group by analyzing the performances on which these identities depend
implies that QDS can develop along two main lines of research. The first
line, rooted in the premise that identities can be defined as networks of
traits, could deconstruct the mechanisms through which certain networks
of traits create socially recognizable and valued identities while other net-
works generate dysphoric or socially devalued identities – for example,
the trait “human” makes a life much more grievable than the trait “farm
animal” or “glacier”. This line of inquiry might also benefit from the appli-
cation of the branch of philosophy known as category theory (Rosch 1999;
Lakoff 1987 to the study of social constructs.
The second line of inquiry, rooted in the premise that identity traits
depend on performances, could deconstruct, on a more concrete and
“hands-on” level, how specific performances are enacted, recognized, and
associated to certain traits, as well as how traits are assigned to actual
bodies of groups of bodies. For example: what happens if we examine the
concrete performances through which the representatives of the medical
power-knowledge system determine the clinical death of a patient (from
checking the lack of pulse and breathing to ascertaining the absence of
brain signals through a brain scan from the perspective of QDS? Or the
performances through which a death certificate signed by a medic leads to
the creation of legal documents? Or the ways of expressing grief that are
considered inadequate, embarrassing or obscene in a given social group?
These two lines of inquiry, of course, are closely intertwined and
involved in a constant process of cross-fertilization. Given this
framework, the potential objects of inquiry are countless: medical cases
in which sit-uating a patient along the life-death spectrum represents
a particularly complex task (like coma or consciousness disorders); the
environmental cost of human health (see Standefer 2020), for example
in the cases of cancer therapy or COVID-19 vaccines; the relation
between health and environmental humanities; the construction of what
Susan Merrill Squier (2004) defines “liminal lives” (embryos and stem
cells, among others); the relation between human and non-human
practices of grief; the application
Whatever | 569 | 4 • 2021
Mattia Petricola
of QDS to design and architecture, from the making of caskets to the mak-
ing of cemeteries; practices of ecological grief like those described in Talk
Death (2020) and Milman (2021); the possibility to theorize the presence of
a “necrophiliac gaze” in art (example might include, among many others,
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Ophelia and Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of
Marat); how art and fiction can help us re-imagine and re-construct the
thanatological imagination of our time (Radomska 2016; Petricola 2018).
We have just begun to scratch the surface.
Mattia Petricola
[email protected]
University of L’Aquila
References
Barad K., 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entan-
glement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Bersani L., 1987, “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, in October, 43: 197-222.
Butler J., 2004, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, Lon-
don.
Calvino I., 1983, Palomar, Einaudi, Turin; Eng. Tr. by W. Weaver 1999, Mr. Palo-
mar, Vintage Books, London.
Deleuze G., Guattari F., 2004, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London.
Dell’Aversano C., 2010, “The love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the
human-animal bond”, in Journal for Critical Animal Studies, VIII, 1/2: 73-125.
Edelman L., 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University
Press, Durham NC.
Haritaworn J., Kuntsman A., Posocco S.,eds., 2014, Queer Necropolitics, Rout-
ledge, New York NY.
Lakoff G.,1987, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About
the Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.
Mbembe A., 2003, “Necropolitics”, in Public Culture, 15, 1: 1140.
Mbembe, A. (2019 [2016]), Necropolitics, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Milman O., 2021, “‘It’s like a rotting carcass of its former self’: funeral for an
Oregon glacier”, in The Guardian, Sun 2 May. https://amp.theguardian.com/en-
vironment/2021/may/02/its-like-a-rotting-carcass-of-its-former-self-funeral-
for-an-oregon-glacier?__twitter_impression=true&s=03 (accessed June 2021).
Whatever | 570 | 4 • 2021
Introduction: Researching Queer Death
Petricola M., 2018, “The Chinese Encyclopedia and the Living Dead. A Queer
Approach to Categorization and Taxonomy in Comparative Literature”, in
Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 1: 75-91
Radomska M., 2016, Uncontainable Life : A Biophilosophy of Bioart, Linköping Uni-
versity Electronic Press, Linköping. https://doi.org/10.3384/diss.diva-126670
Radomska M., Mehrabi T, Lykke N., 2019, “Queer Death Studies: Coming to
Terms with Death, Dying and Mourning Differently. An Introduction”, in
Women, Gender & Research, 28, 34: 311.
Radomska M., Mehrabi T., Lykke N., 2020, “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying
and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective”, in Australian Feminist Stud-
ies, 35, 104: 81-100.
Rosch E., 1999, “Principles of categorization”, in E. Margolis, S. Laurence, eds.,
Concepts: Core Readings, MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 189-206.
Squier S.M., 2004, Liminal Lives. Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomed-
icine, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Standefer K.E., 2020, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Sav-
ing a Life, Little, Brown Spark, New York NY.
Talk Death, 2020, Ecological Grief: Mourning the Loss of Our Planet, https://
www.talkdeath.com/ecological-grief-mourning-loss-our-planet/ (accessed
June 2021).
Watney S., 1987, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, University
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN.
Whatever | 571 | 4 • 2021
References (21)
Barad K., 2007, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entan- glement of Matter and Meaning, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Bersani L., 1987, "Is the Rectum a Grave?", in October, 43: 197-222.
Butler J., 2004, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, Lon- don.
Calvino I., 1983, Palomar, Einaudi, Turin; Eng. Tr. by W. Weaver 1999, Mr. Palo- mar, Vintage Books, London.
Deleuze G., Guattari F., 2004, A Thousand Plateaus, Continuum, London.
Dell'Aversano C., 2010, "The love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the human-animal bond", in Journal for Critical Animal Studies, VIII, 1/2: 73-125.
Edelman L., 2004, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Haritaworn J., Kuntsman A., Posocco S.,eds., 2014, Queer Necropolitics, Rout- ledge, New York NY.
Lakoff G.,1987, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL.
Mbembe A., 2003, "Necropolitics", in Public Culture, 15, 1: 1140.
Mbembe, A. (2019 [2016]), Necropolitics, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Milman O., 2021, "'It's like a rotting carcass of its former self': funeral for an Oregon glacier", in The Guardian, Sun 2 May. https://amp.theguardian.com/en- vironment/2021/may/02/its-like-a-rotting-carcass-of-its-former-self-funeral- for-an-oregon-glacier?__twitter_impression=true&s=03 (accessed June 2021). 571 | 4 • 2021
Petricola M., 2018, "The Chinese Encyclopedia and the Living Dead. A Queer Approach to Categorization and Taxonomy in Comparative Literature", in Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies, 1: 75-91
Radomska M., 2016, Uncontainable Life : A Biophilosophy of Bioart, Linköping Uni- versity Electronic Press, Linköping. https://doi.org/10.3384/diss.diva-126670
Radomska M., Mehrabi T, Lykke N., 2019, "Queer Death Studies: Coming to Terms with Death, Dying and Mourning Differently. An Introduction", in Women, Gender & Research, 28, 34: 311.
Radomska M., Mehrabi T., Lykke N., 2020, "Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective", in Australian Feminist Stud- ies, 35, 104: 81-100.
Rosch E., 1999, "Principles of categorization", in E. Margolis, S. Laurence, eds., Concepts: Core Readings, MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 189-206.
Squier S.M., 2004, Liminal Lives. Imagining the Human at the Frontiers of Biomed- icine, Duke University Press, Durham NC.
Standefer K.E., 2020, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Sav- ing a Life, Little, Brown Spark, New York NY.
Talk Death, 2020, Ecological Grief: Mourning the Loss of Our Planet, https:// www.talkdeath.com/ecological-grief-mourning-loss-our-planet/ (accessed June 2021).
Watney S., 1987, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS, and the Media, University Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN.
Mattia Petricola
University of L'Aquila, Post-Doc
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