Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism interrogates heteronormative imperatives that includes the fantasy of progression that fail to account for queerness’ inevitable drive towards its own death. Instances of queer deaths such as HIV/AIDS are stuck in a cycle of failed progress because it falls under an identity within the illusion, only by constant self-interrogation can queer people settle with the undesired to be social recognized.

What characterises queer apocal(o)ptic/ism? It is queer’s relentless questioning of all categorical imperatives, including the ontology Queer itself. The unremitting desire to undo, disrupt and make trouble for norms. The recognition that queer is transitory and momentary and thus might be superseded or become defunct as an interpretative tool at some future date, as well as the dedication to examining the notion of utility itself. It is queer’s commitment to the here and now, the present, not putting faith in the always postponed future but in making an immediate intervention. It is the anti-assimilationist bent in queer theory, the activist strain with its refusal to be defined by or in terms set down by the dominant culture in any given situation. It points to the fact that queer is brought into being through acts of resistance, the recognition of the potential futility of resistance because of the norm’s propensity for cooption and reinvention, but the drive towards resistance all the same. It is the trace of queer’s investments in deconstruction and psychoanalysis, the refusal to normative coherence as fantasy and the making visible of the instability that constitutes any one thing. It characterises queer’s dedication to end things and traumatic events, its commitment to death – whether it is the mournful rage of activists in response to queer deaths arising from suicide, HIV/AIDS or queer bashings; the theorist’s inventiveness to the point of unintelligibility in an attempt to cast off the psychical death wrought by the identitarian strai(gh)tjacket (Haver 1997) , or the anarchic proclamations of death to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of ‘the death-drive, always present in any vital process’), or the anarchic proclamations of death to the compulsions of heteronormativity. It is the queer embodiment of ‘the death-drive, always present in any vital process’ Hird, M. J. (2008). Queer itself is haunted by the death drive, driven both towards its own ‘death’ and by the knowledge that it will – must – end; towards a time when it will be either superseded or no longer useful, needed, required, or desired (Butler 1993, 228). Queer apocal(o)ptic/ism also encapsulates the apocalyptic moments at which the death drive becomes the destruction drive in the service of shattering an imposing illusion produced as a shifting signifier of heteronormative hegemony. In this, queer apocal(o)ptic/ism begins at the level of the self. It refers to an unremitting self-interrogation, the constant production of unease at the level of identification – unsettling the very desire for social recognition as an identifiable subject – in the realisation that ‘queer must insist … on disturbing … and on queering ourselves and our investment in [social] organization. For queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one’ (Edelman 2004, 17).