Apocalypse, Now: Queer hope for the end of the world and Dew Kim's Succulent Humans

This chapter focuses on one example of a queer response to conservative framings of homosexuality as an apocalyptic threat: Succulent Humans, a collection of works by the Korean contemporary artist Dew Kim (b. 1985, Korea). In the future envisioned in Succulent Humans, ecological destruction has muddied the borders between bodies, be they human or not; likewise, fixed and striated categories of sex, gender, and desire have also dissipated. From a cisheteropatriarchal perspective, this future is monstrous, apocalyptic, and ‘failed’: rather than hoping for the successful reproduction or perfection of the existing social and biological order, the exhibition appears to fantasise about its end. This chapter traces the ascendency of the notion of the body, in tandem with the development of capitalist modernity in Korea, as autonomous, bounded, and sovereign. It then mobilises Paul B. Preciado’s notion of a ‘countersexual’ queer utopia to examine the alternative, more fluid understanding of the body, its organs, and its orifices, as displayed in Succulent Humans. This chapter also explores the ecological implications of understanding the body as open and porous and asks how Succulent Humans intervenes in mainstream environmentalist discourses of pollution and toxicity. My conclusion examines how queer reimaginings of disastrous and monstrous futures might bolster us against the supposed doom of the apocalypse and its harbingers (queer people among them), or perhaps even carry us beyond this doom, by transcending fatalistic narratives of utopia versus apocalypse, life versus death, and ‘us’ versus ‘them’.