Queer ecopoetical metapolitics: reading Wendy Delorme’s Le Parlement de l’eau (2025) alongside Michel Serres’s Le Contrat naturel (1990)

Description

A prescient intervention first published in 1990, when there was still scope for legitimate scientific debate about climate change, Michel Serres’s Le Contrat naturel is not usually read as queer. Nevertheless, its lyrical closing evocation of authorial congress with the quaking earth is a decidedly queer way to conclude a treatise calling for a radical reimagining of humanity’s relationship to the planet. In this early intervention by Serres, I argue that we also find several of the most contentious characteristics of more explicitly queer later responses to the global environmental catastrophe: (i) the metapolitical suggestion that democratic politics must be superseded by a benevolent form of enlightened technocratic rule better suited to the urgencies of the moment; (ii) the belief that the natural world supplies models for such a metapolitical community; (iii) the conviction that a lyrical ecopoetics is more effective than rational argument in persuading readers of the need for such changes.

For example, in her lyrical yet precisely crafted multilayered masterpiece, Wendy Delorme shows us a profusion of chattery watery Entities meeting to conduct creative writing workshops in the head of a bipolar author, composing a fiction-within-the-fiction, set in France in 2050, when rivers have dried up, water for drinking and farming has become a scarce and rationed commodity and a police state hunts down climate migrants and attacks protestors with a merciless brutality that is recognisably an extrapolation from our present. At times, the different narrative levels touch, with transformative yet almost uncontrollable effects that suggest a vision of how crafting fictions in the face of catastrophe can be transformative. Drawing on the earlier analysis of Serres’s text, this part of the paper examines that practice of metapolitical ecopoetics and its queer-feminist evocation of the watery circle of life.

Period	3 Sept 2026
Event title	'Crisis or Catastrophe?': ASMCF annual conference
Event type	Conference
Location	London, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International