Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab: Rethinking Waste, Decomposition and Death through a Queerfeminist Lens

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I explore human and transgenic fruit fly relations in the laboratory and in relation to everyday practices of waste management. I rely on ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden, in which scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Grounding myself within new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories, I explore queer ecologies of death in the lab as a material-discursive phenomenon. I discuss how heteronormative and humanistic ideologies about ‘purity’ and ‘pure Nature’ shape the space of the laboratory and regulate waste management practices. However, as I present, the materiality of the living and dead matter problematises such fantasies of purity and pre-described categories of laboratory waste. Flies’ bodies, living and nonliving, cross the boundaries between inside and outside, natural and unnatural/artificial, safe and hazardous waste, and life and death, creating queer ecologies of death. Queer ecologies of death suggest new modes of thinking about agency, (non)human and (non)living within the context of laboratory waste management that go beyond the limits of human exceptionalism and modernist hierarchical binary logic that is essential to and constitutive of the notion of purity and the imaginary of a pure nature out there.