This book was typeset by Erik Schlyter using L A T E X. The image on the cover is the artwork of Juan Bosco -www.juan-bosco.com.

No abstract

This special issue aims to rethink death, dying and mourning through theoretical and methodological modes of queering. These modes are mobilised under three overarching themes: (1) queer (necro)politics, which focuses not only on regimes and technologies that subjugate “life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2003, 39), while rendering some lives more grievable than others, but also, on queer modes of resistance; (2) posthuman ethico-politics of death, which seeks to problematise and undermine human exceptionalism, while exploring human/nonhuman relationalities in the context of death and dying; and (3) queering death and mourning, which concentrates on nonnormative practices of remembering and mourning the dead.

This introduction to the Queer Death Studies special issue explores an emerging transdisciplinary field of research. This field critically, (self-)reflexively and affirmatively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by current planetary scale necropolitics and its framing of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world. It is set against the background of traditional engagements with the question of death, often grounded in Western hegemonic and normative ideas of dying, dead and mourning subjects and bodies, on the one hand; and on the other contemporary discourses on human and nonhuman death and extinction, directly linked to the environmental crisis, capitalist and post/colonial extractivist necropolitics, material and symbolic violence, oppression and inequalities, and socioeconomic , political and ecological unsustainabilities. By bringing together conceptual and analytical tools grounded in feminist materialisms and feminist theorising broadly speaking, queer theory and decolonial critique, the contributions in this special issue strive to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.

Situated within feminist technoscience studies and affect theory, this article explores the methodological specificities of working with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Based on a year of participatory observation in a fly lab, the article challenges the modernist imaginaries of laboratory work as disembodied, detached and objective. It suggests that laboratory work is instead an interactive, embodied and affective process that takes place in proximity between human and non-human, subject and object. The article therefore contributes to earlier feminist science studies arguing that doing science is an interactive, procedural, socio-cultural phenomenon. However, while most such previous works focus on issues such as connections, companionship, love and empathy, this article asks what  ethodological contributions can come from experiencing the intensity of more than human encounters that inspire undesirable feelings such as disgust.