Heather Davis’s “Human Energy: Oil Erotics, Violence, and Queer Desire” will examine the artist Jessica Segall’s engagement of fossil fuel extraction as a queer method of erotic resistance in her work Human Energy (2023). Davis’s article will unpack the complex relations Segall makes between embodied pleasure and extractive violence.
Heather Davis is assistant professor of Culture and Media at The New School. Her work draws on feminist and queer theory to examine ecology, materiality, and contemporary art in the context of settler colonialism. She is the author of Plastic Matter (Duke University Press, 2022), co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015), and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (McGill Queen’s University Press, 2017). Her writing has appeared in publications including Afterall, Camera Obscura, Canadian Art, e-flux Journal, PhiloSOPHIA, and Third Text.