Circulating desire: queer logistical aesthetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT In The Deadly Life of Logistics (2014), Deborah Cowen asks what a queer engagement with logistics space might look like. In the years following this publication, there has been an increase in interest in critical approaches to logistics, infrastructure, and supply chains, yet hardly any of this work has been taken up in queer scholarship. This article offers an analysis of Netflix’s Sense8 (2015–2018), arguing that the series be read as a queer engagement with logistics, offering what I term a “queer logistical aesthetic.” I argue that the series seemingly responds to Cowen’s call for alternative inhabitations of networked logistics, fantasizing that the network imaginary of global supply chain capitalism might be inhabited differently, as a queer circuit of desire. Yet, as much as Sense8 seems to produce a queer logistical aesthetic, one that re-imagines supply chain capitalism, this aesthetic, in the end, remains in a complicated and ambivalent tangle with the present-day logistics that enables it. Via this reading of Sense8, this article contributes to bringing queer theory and contemporary queer aesthetics into closer conversation with late capitalist logistics discourse.