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 Nina Lykke and Camila Marambio 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? Challenging the idea of cancer as an isolated enemy to be eradicated, this book sees it as a manifestation of the 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, between necropolitics and vibrantly ongoing life. 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, 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.

Nina Lykke, Emerita-Professor, Dr. Phil., Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden, and Honorary Professor, Aarhus University, Denmark. She participated in the building of Feminist Studies in Scandinavia and Europe more broadly for many years. She is also a poet and writer, and co-founder the International Network for Queer Death Studies. Her current research focuses on posthuman eco-poetics, the queering of cancer, death, and mourning in posthuman, queerfemme-inist, new-materialist, decolonial, eco-critical and spiritual-material perspectives. Author and co-author of numerous monographs such as Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010), Vibrant Death (2022), Feminist Reconfigurings of Alien Encounters (2024), and co-editor of the forthcoming Routledge International Handbook of Queer Death Studies.

Camila Marambio, Co-director of Ecological Culture/Curator of New Perspectives at Para la Naturaleza, Borikén (Puerto Rico). Curated the Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Art Biennale (2022). Completed a postdoc at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm, as part of the Seedbox: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory (2021). Holds a PhD in Curatorial Practice from Monash University, Australia (2019). Founder of the nomadic research practice Ensayos (2010–2024) on the archipelago of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America. Published in Third Text, Terremoto, Australian Feminist Studies, Discipline, The River Rail, Kerb Journal, among others. Co-authored Slow Down Fast, A Toda Raja with Cecilia Vicuña (2019) and Cancer Ecologies with Nina Lykke (2025).