Burning Hope: Staging Queer Ecology in a Time of Wildfire

Abstract

This article analyzes three contemporary plays by trans and gender-non-conforming artists from the United States that engage with forest fires and queer ecology. These three plays – MJ Kaufman’s Sagittarius Ponderosa, Agnes Borinsky’s The Trees, and Kari Barclay’s How to Live in a House on Fire – tie wildfire to colonial histories of fire suppression and imagine a just climate transition as linked to queer and trans self-reinvention. The article describes this dramaturgical tactic as ‘burning hope’ – letting go of straight, settler desire and gesturing toward reciprocal obligation with the non-human world. Building on Kim TallBear’s call to attend to organic matter and Stephen Pyne’s study of fire history in the ‘Pyrocene’, the article imagines theatre as a prescribed burn that can re-orient audience relations to futurity. Burning hope does not abandon hope; it recognizes grief as mobilization for environmentalist solidarities.