Apocalyptic Everyday

This essay approaches queer theory's much-debated object, futurity, through ethnographic encounters with kotis in eastern India that keep thwarting queer theory's attempts to mine minoritized subjects’ lives for pedagogic moments of resistance. The author had started fieldwork with the question of how the memories of the dead circulated in koti communities, but with time, they observed how accounts of violent deaths often descended into laughter. How do we theorize this laughter? Is this an apocalyptic laughter that signals a shattering of worlds as we know them, or does it signal that violence is so ordinary that kotis can only express skepticism and laugh about how one submits to power? Or is this laughter a signal of other imaginaries of worlds whose meanings are yet to be apprehended? The author found themself witnessing how life is made within the stranglehold of violence. Such modes of life making are as much about care as about carelessness, as much about immersion in community as about ambivalence about it, and as shattering as world building. Kotis have always lived in the aftermath of apocalypse in their forever dissolving worlds where violence is not an event but an environment in which life unfolds.