Date of Award
Winter 1-15-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Program
Global Arts and Cultures
First Advisor
Molly Volanth Hall
Second Advisor
Sage Gerson
Third Advisor
Molly Kelly
Abstract
This thesis develops a phenomenological method for reading speculative literature as a site where queer ecological temporality is experienced rather than explained. Working with Annihilation (2014) by Jeff VanderMeer, The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham, and Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020) by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, the project treats reading as a bodily practice shaped by forms of attention. Texts are not interpreted for stable meaning and instead I remain with moments where resolution is withheld. The work is informed by a Marxist attention to how capitalist time organizes labor, productivity, and value, and how ecological disruption exposes the limits of those temporal logics. The methodology chapter establishes phenomenological reading and phenomenological writing as related by distinct practices. Reading is defined as an attentional practice that stays with sensation prior to conceptual capture, while writing is framed a formal refusal of closure that resists chrononormative expectations. Fragmentation and return are articulated as methodological commitments rather than stylistic choices.
Chapter One, “Queer Ecological Temporalities,” examines how ecological time disrupts linear, capitalist temporality frameworks. Through close readings of environment and landscape in Annihilation, infrastructural collapse in The Day of the Triffids, and breath-based relation in Undrowned, the chapter shows how ecological systems persist through accumulation and endurance without the expectation of progress. Ecological time is framed as materially incompatible with human schedules of productivity and mastery, revealing queerness not as metaphor but as temporal condition enacted by ecological relations themselves. Chapter Two, “Disorientation,” focuses on how these texts produce temporal misalignment at the level of the body. Drawing on queer phenomenology and crip temporal theory, the chapter analyzes moments of un-naming, epistemic breakdown, and the removal of orienting devices such as clocks, maps, and stable categories. Disorientation is treated not as a problem to be resolved but as a sustained condition that makes dominant temporal forms perceptible. Reading becomes an embodied negotiation with uncertainty, where attention replaces explanation. Chapter Three, “Refusal,” develops refusal as a queer and crip temporal practice. Through sustained attention to breath and non-productivity the chapter traces how these texts withdraw from demands for futurity. Refusal appears as a reorganization of rhythm and pace—most explicitly in Undrowned’s breath-based pedagogy, but also in Annihilation’s rejection of mastery and The Day of the Triffid’s suspension of recovery narratives.
The project concludes with an “inconclusion” that extends this refusal into the form of the thesis itself. There is no argument that is synthesized into a final position. The work remains open, treating unfinishedness as an ethical and temporal stance. By writing from within The Rift, my thesis offers phenomenological reading as a practice of staying with time as it is lived—queer and unknown.
Recommended Citation
Ruiz Perez, Daniela, "Writing from the Rift: Queer Temporality and the Refusal of Resolution" (2026). Masters Theses. 1526.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1526
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