Queer and Crip Caregiving in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts

Abstract: Rivers Solomon's spacefaring debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), offers a provocative challenge to our understanding of climate disaster by locating generative care and hope for human and nonhuman life in queer, trans, and intersex nonprocreative and nonprocreating characters. By centering queer bodies, relationships, and kinship communities, the novel shifts the focus of care away from heterosexual and procreative ideas of futurity, where human survival is presumed secure through procreation, and which replicate heteropatriarchal social order, and instead looks toward the creation of healthy community through practices of caregiving. Finally, the narrative's focalization of neurodivergence and disability illustrates care as a practice of meeting primary needs in a contingent ecosystem for the well-being of all. "Queer" and "crip," in this essay, are read as irreducibly intertwined orientations toward others that together allow for a reimagination of community through a heightened awareness of a need-based care ethics in light of the radical interdependence of beings in ecosystems.