Cancer Ecologies

Cancer Ecologies: A Queer Femme Portal invites readers on a journey through the tangled roots of the current cancer epidemic.

Moving between personal accounts and eco-critical reflections, the authors ask: What if cancer is not just a personal tragedy or monstrous invader, but a symptom of Earth in distress – a message from the planet itself? The book challenges the idea of cancer as an isolated enemy to be eradicated, reading it instead as manifesting toxic entanglements of the Anthropocene: capitalist extraction, colonial exploitation, and environmental degradation.

Through an eco-ethics of softness, the authors – one living with cancer, the other a carer to a partner who died from it – explore how cancer might be approached as a portal: as a conversation between pain and possibility, necropolitics and vibrantly ongoing life cycles – as an opening to radical tenderness, multispecies solidarity, and unexpected kinship relations. Encouraging readers to understand themselves not as separate from Earth, but as lovers entangled with peatmoss, the microalgae, diatoms, and other humble creatures that sustain us, Lykke and Marambio contemplate their queerfemme-inine and critically posthuman entrypoints to a rethinking of cancer.

Cancer Ecologies experiments with a genre-bending methodology: part poetic story-telling and part eco-philosophical analysis. The book offers a transformative rethinking of cancer: less as a battle, more as an invitation to compost grief and cultivate ongoing cycles of life and death, rooted in relationality, shared vulnerability, and practices of joy.