"Posthuman Poetics and Queer Ecologies" – a lecture by Nina Lykke

The lecture will discuss questions of posthuman poetics, emerging from my queer, aesthetic experimental writing practices, which try to reconfigure the conventional (sovereign) speaking position of the lyrical “I” of classic modern Western poetry, and change the distribution of agencies in poetic worlds from human to more-than-human agential forces. In focus are the entangled poetic, spiritual-material and philosophical mourning practices I contemplated in my book (Nina Lykke: Vibrant Death 2022). I ask if they - together with posthuman phenomenological approaches – can sustain the unfolding of altered more-than-human companionships, while overcoming the Euromodern subjects’ deep-seated insensitivities towards the more-than human world.

Nina Lykke is Professor Emerita, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Adjunct Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. She participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly for many years. She is also a poet and writer, and has recently co-founded an international network for Queer Death Studies. She is author of numerous books such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022), and Feminist Reconfigurations of Alien Encounters (with Katja Aglert and Line Henriksen 2024). She has recently published in journals such as Australian Feminist Studies; NORA; Catalyst; Environmental Humanities; Social Identities; and Lambda Nordica.

The lecture was held at Konstfack on 15 April 2024.
The documentation and editing of the lecture was made by André Córdova Rudstedt.
Contact: katja.aglert@konstfack.se