Queer Necroecologies

In this article, the author aims to explore relations between plants and human trans queer bodies in Vjeran Miladinović Merlinka’s Terezin sin (2013), and Uroš Filipović’s Staklenac (2002). Brutalization appears as a technology for intensive shaping of trans queer human and plant bodies into non-existence, considering that trans queer human and plant bodies encounter each other in particular necroecological spaces on specific occasions marked by violence, such as cruising and sex work. The article’s main contribution to the study of more-than-human socialities is the assertion that the necroecologically produced plants take on two forms through brutalization: they are affective plant-bodies in Merlinka’s text, and generic plant-ness in Filipović’s text. Generic plant-ness is produced through brutalization of plants into “mere” shrubs that serve as means of protection in spaces where sexual encounters take place, while Merlinka’s plant companions are affective plant-bodies that are not accidentally touched but caressed and cared for.