Abstract

In Michelle Tea’s 2016 metafictional queercore autobiographical novel Black Wave, the queer punk community of late-1990s San Francisco faces the end of the world as environmental collapse due to climate change accelerates. The protagonist, femme writer Michelle, moves to Los Angeles, hoping to leave addiction behind and renew her commitment to writing her memoir while waiting for a cataclysmic tsunami to hit California. As a dystopian historical work that immortalizes and problematizes a queer golden age without a future, Black Wave unhinges the inherent structure of the apocalyptic idea in that cataclysm is conceived not as a rupture but as an inevitable extension of an already environmentally, institutionally, and culturally broken world. This paper argues, from a queer ecological/ecofeminist perspective, that the novel offers an inspiring vision of queer resilience in the context of climate change, a vision based in a dark ecological, “transnatural” embrace of waste and irony, empathy for marginalized Others, and a punk iteration of “queer time.” Black Wave illustrates that for those already living at the margins/in the ruins of capitalism, instability and uncertainty are the status quo, hence their potential for a dark ecological approach to apocalypse; Tea’s queer ecological politicization of subjectivity in waste generates a “dark sweetness” of flourishing vs. fear within environmental uncertainty—of “ongoingness” based in the radical flexibility and openness of queer time. The characters in Black Wave exemplify queer resilience in their ability to creatively persist and imagine a life of value and integrity despite environmental upheaval and social marginality, contrary to the requirements of hegemonic institutions and norms. Michelle in particular epitomizes the adaptive potential in queer ecological humor, empathy, creativity, and openness to erotic and other material experiences and connections in and around waste in the context of pollution-driven climate change.