Dis_Possessing the (queer) body for the Chthulucene?! Imagining LGBTIQ* politics beyond liberal proprietism

Against the backdrop of ecological destruction and the rise of climate activism, this paper aims to shed light on the tensions and ambivalences between LGBTIQ*-rights politics that focus, and legally rely on, the most powerful political fiction of “self-ownership” and the imagination/realization/practice of the Chtulucene as “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with” (Haraway). Struggles for LGBTIQ*-rights largely rely on the idea of self-owned subjects whose relationship to their bodies, desires and sexuality becomes one of individual ownership. By contrast, posthuman, decolonial and new materialist ecologies focus on interconnectedness, stressing, as for instance Donna Haraway has put it, that people do not “own” their bodies, but are rather in company with (or vastly outnumbered by) bacteria, fungi, and genomes. By critically interlinking different strands of critiques toward the concept of self-ownership, this paper aims to problematize how ‚having‘ and ‚being‘ have been culturally interwoven (in capitalist, liberal, westocentric societies) and also shape ideas of the rights-bearing, queer liberal subject. Thus, I want to ask how we can take account for queer, trans* and inter* vulnerabilities, violence and dispossessions while at the same time working towards post-capitalist futures that focus on interconnectedness, reciprocity and natureculture-entanglements rather than on enhancing “property”?