My work compares queer environmental writing about urban redevelopment after World War II to contemporary queer and trans environmental writing about climate emergency in coastal cities. This comparison helps elucidate the expectations of normative infrastructure that undergird both queer and trans critiques of social normativity and the affects produced by disidentifying with normative expectations. My book project, The Climate of AIDS: Loss and Desire in the Urban Environment, 1950-2020, argues that queer theory has always been a theory of infrastructure. I trace queer responses to infrastructural precarity in New York from the demolition and clearance of Black, Brown, and low-income urban neighborhoods and mass suburbanization in the 1950s and 1960s to critiques of state climate resiliency planning projects in the present. I ask: how might the core questions of queer and trans studies shift to respond to conditions of climate emergency that change relationships between infrastructure and social norms? And how can reading queer literary texts, letters, and interventions in city planning from the 1950s and 1960s that stage affective relationships with infrastructure as integral to queer intimacy help us understand how queer affects develop in response to infrastructural precarity? I use an archive that pairs queer and trans literary and cultural texts with urban and environmental history, climate science, and planning and policy documents to trace how what we understand as queer affects develop in dialogue with infrastructures of urban redevelopment, and how queer studies can draw on this history to contribute to interdisciplinary work on racialized precarity in the context of climate emergency.
Davy Knittle (he/they) works at the intersection of queer and trans studies, environmental humanities, and urban studies. He is currently revising his book project, "The Climate of AIDS: Loss and Desire in the Urban Environment, 1950-2020," which traces queer and trans writing's foundational commitments to addressing infrastructural and environmental change.