Daniela Ruiz Pérez

Writing From the Rift: Queer Temporality and the Refusal of Resolution

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. I engage with the text and remain with moments where resolution is withheld. My 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. Chapter One, “Queer Ecological Temporalities,” examines how ecological time disrupts linear, capitalist temporality frameworks. Chapter Two, “Disorientation,” focuses on how these texts produce temporal misalignment at the level of the body. Chapter Three, “Refusal,” develops refusal as a queer and crip temporal practice.

The project concludes with an “inconclusion” that extends this refusal into the form of the thesis itself. There is no argument 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.

Breath

Dwelling

Discomfort
 

Drift

Process