Queer Cosmos
Every era comes with its own sensemaking tools that fracture our current understandings and ways of knowing. These new ways of seeing compel us to look differently, to question the image of the world we had created. Queer theory has done precisely this: it has unsettled the norms and dismantled fixed categories to embrace fluidity, ambiguity, and the life that thrives at the margins. It is pushing us to understand a world of complexities and nuances, resisting the arbitrary simplifications that have caused so much harm.
Countless minds have carried queer theory into new spheres, from literature to ecology, and I follow this impulse to expand it beyond Earth. For a long time I have pondered how queerness might guide us toward a Cosmos understood through lenses free of violence, bias, oversimplification, and objectification. In the words that follow, I will move by intuition rather than academic rigour, playing with the notion of queering our ways of knowing the Cosmos, imagining it otherwise, and cherishing it in all its gradients.
As a rule of thumb, it is wise to be suspicious of any binaries we encounter. Unless you are a computer, the world is far more than a binary system. It is layered, chaotic, errant, bewildering, and, for the most part, incomprehensible. Consider the divide between Earth and ‘outer space’. There is something off about constructing a single immense ‘other’ beyond our earthly grounds, set apart from ‘us,’ to contain everything that exists out there. This sharp division between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ so deeply embedded in our histories, our maps, and our stories, breeds separation. The truth is simple: Earth is in space. We are in space, and what could be more cosmic than living on a celestial body?
It was in the 50’s when Theodore von Kármán proposed creating an imaginary line that would divide Earth and space at 80 - 100 km above the sea level. Though useful for lawyers and the military, it draws a false boundary. In reality, Earth’s skies stretch far beyond that line. The atmosphere flows past the International Space Station, past our satellites, and even, in the form of drifting hydrogen atoms, beyond the Moon. One could say the Moon exists within our atmosphere, just as Earth is within the atmosphere of the Sun, just as the solar system is within an interstellar cloud of dust. The edges of the Universe are more elusive than we imagine and what we often picture as solid boundaries are, in truth, porous membranes. Existence blends and bleeds into itself, touching in degrees and durations, in contours that resist geometry, in formations that defy form. The Cosmos, by nature, is fluid.
A moment of stillness, just before sunset, reveals a slow alchemy of colour. Blues deepen, dissolving into golds; oranges bloom from the mingling of light and suspended dust, only to surrender to fleeting violets and pinks. One edge of the horizon darkens while the other still glows. Then, almost imperceptibly, the radiance of day fades, and the first stars emerge from the deepening dark.
To mark the exact instant when day ends and night begins is as arbitrary as imagining someone unplugging the Sun. The Universe resists such tidy binaries. Day and night are coarse terms to capture the shifting spectacle of Earth’s rotation. Among the Indigenous peoples of the Andes, this binary is nothing else than a curiosity. For them, there is no rigid divide, only subtle transitions; and what matters is not naming the extremes, but recognising the continuum and the interdependence between them.
Consider how we classify stars as “alive” or “dead,” planets as “habitable” or “uninhabitable,” galaxies as “active” or “passive.” Even our ethical compass, our sense of whether we should intervene in the Cosmos, is shaped by a binary: is there life, or is there not? If the answer is no, the path is cleared to use, extract, and exploit. Stripped of nuance, these worlds are sorted into those that serve human purpose (or unproductive fantasies) and those that might be spared in the case they shelter a form of life we can recognise or relate to.
To queer the existences in the Cosmos is to honour their being, not for what they do for us, or what they might contain, but simply for what they are - for the sake of existencehood. Why is the Moon important? Or a cloud-wrapped planet in the far reaches of a system we barely know? Because they are. Because they exist, in what we know of them, and just as much in what we do not. A queer theory approach looks at the celestial with this lens, lingering in liminal spaces and gradual transitions, where categories blur. Brown dwarfs, for example, are something between a star and planet, challenging our neat taxonomies, reminding us that the Cosmos thrives in the in-between.
Much of our cosmological storytelling is cast in human terms. We speak of galactic cannibalism, imagining majestic mergers as acts of hunger and devouring. We describe a planet’s loss of magnetic field as death, as though a world were a body slipping into stillness. These metaphors, though evocative, are not innocent. They echo our cultural fixations on death and lineage, on conflict and collapse, projecting human dramas onto celestial phenomena.
Should the Cosmos be a stage for familiar narratives of life and death, hunger and inheritance, beginnings and ends? This is not an easy question to answer, for human culture was born from crafting stories in the stars. We rely on familiar stories to find meaning whenever there is a void in our existence. Perhaps a good step is to begin to reflect on the language we use in cosmology, to see whether our desires for conquest, annihilation, and destruction are woven into it? Take, for example, the way we say a star explodes in a supernova, evoking images of violence and destruction. What if we reframed this event as a blooming - an incandescent flowering that pollinates the Universe?
Cosmology is often told as a linear script, a narrative arc from a singular beginning, the Big Bang, to an inevitable ending. It is a story with a start, a climax, and a fade to black. This structure mirrors Western ideas of time and progress, echoing the myth of the straight line that always moves forward, upward, and outward toward growth and expansion with a single unique end.
Are there other temporalities in the Cosmos? Could there be cosmologies shaped by cycles, returns, and spirals? Cultures around the world have stories that do not follow the three-act structure, but weave stories within stories, petals around a shared centre, loops that return yet never repeat. The Cosmos feels closer to these forms, where moments fold into one another, where all times might coexist, layered and simultaneous, where in the multiverses every path is taken and time scatters into a prism rather than stretching into a single line. These ways of telling refuse the rule of a singular narrative. They free us from the forward march of time and the myth of destiny, offering instead a Cosmos that is plural, recursive, and strange.
Queering the Cosmos invites a different kind of cosmology, one that does not ask the Universe to mirror our histories, our binaries, or our desires. It calls us to imagine other logics: presence without purpose, kindness over destruction, interconnectedness over competition, kinship without dominance. To queer our understanding of the Cosmos is to let it breathe beyond the cage of worn-out paradigms, to let it sparkle with meanings born from non-dominant narratives, and to refuse the need for a single origin or a final destination. It is to envision a Universe not bound to a script of progress, but alive in flux
Integrating these perspectives does not mean abandoning the empirical. It means recognising that all observation is shaped by culture, by what we are taught to notice, what we are trained to ignore, and what questions we believe are worth asking. Western science is not neutral; it is a tradition shaped by conquest, extraction, and mastery over nature. To bring queer theory into dialogue with science is not to estrange it, but to deepen it, to make it more honest, and to reveal its partialities, assumptions, and blind spots. This is not a rejection of science, but an opening toward a more expansive, truthful, and enchanted engagement with the Cosmos.
To embrace cosmological fluidity is to welcome chaos, multiplicity, and contradiction not as problems to be solved, but as conditions of existence itself. It is to accept that the Universe resists neat endings and stable meanings, that it blooms in uncertainty, ambiguity, and entanglement. Applying queer theory to cosmology means questioning assumptions about objective knowledge, challenging traditions of scientific dominance rooted in colonial thinking, and embracing approaches based on relationality, wonder, and unknowing.