Solace in the Stars: Queer Astrology, Capitalism, and Colonialism

Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Christopher Joseph Lee, “Solace in the Stars: Queer Astrology, Capitalism, and Colonialism,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 9, no. 3 (2022): 165–172. ISSN 2327-1574. All rights reserved. In an article entitled “Who Needs Astrology,” which borrows its title from Stuart Halls’s essay, “Who Needs ‘Identity,’”1 Tabitha PradoRichardson posits that the resurgent appeal of contemporary astrology lies in its capacity to hold “both optimism and pessimism depending on emotional necessity.”2 Although queer theories of the early oughts valorized entropic force, scheming spectacular ends to futuristic thinking and positing asociality as an organizing politics, astrology stages a stubbornly relational and anticipatory frame— not optimism, necessarily, but an understanding that good things can still happen despite the sinking sensation that things are only getting worse. This partially utopic frame explains the appeal of astrology, especially its ascendant popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, where astrology offered a reprieve from more rigid structures of identity. In the socalled ‘Age of Aquarius,’ astrology promised an era of countercultural change unfolding against the backdrop of widespread protests against the Vietnam War and movements for sexual and societal freedom.3 Now, in another moment of upheaval marked by catastrophic ecocide, the rise of ethnonationalism, and a pandemic that has leveled an asymmetric toll across the Global South and vulnerable communities in the Global North, astrology has gained a new audience who seek solace in the stars. Even if astrology might appear too insubstantial to confront the magnitude of these crises, the resurgent interest in astrology F O R U M