English Visiting Speaker Seminar: Dr Tom Houlton, University of York Cruising the Monument: Funerary Flowers, Queer Ecologies, and the Small Pleasures of Remembrance

Monuments and memorials mark where terror and counterterror did and do occur. They can also become agents of terror and counterterror themselves, drawn irresistibly into a discourse that they shape, part of what Achille Mbembe calls ‘an immense therapeutic liturgy'. What might happen if—rather like compulsory heterosexuality, or compulsory whiteness, or compulsory ableism—we choose to refuse the monumental? If all monuments are erected as a gesture of desired domination and supremacy, an assertion of (or wrestling for) control by one group—no matter its politics—over another, then how can we achieve a monumental remembrance without taking hostages? This talk will take examples from yew trees, stone, pansies, and Derek Jarman, to explore what it means for LGBTQ+ subjects to dwell in power, to monumentalise outside of pre-existing heteronormative, supremacist structures. I will examine a form of queer monumentality that is rooted, not in the ephemerality so closely seized upon as ‘anti-monumental', but rather in a deeper ecological time that isn't antirelational, but seeks to form new relationality through organisms existing in different temporalities to our own.

Thomas Houlton is a lecturer in Film & Literature at the University of York. His research interests include monuments and memorialisation, queer ecology, the AIDS crisis, genre film, and Golden Era Hollywood. He has published recent articles on Ted Kotcheff's 1971 “Ozploitation” movie Wake in Fright (2025), and a catalogue contribution to the Ali Cherri: How I Am Monument exhibition held at Secession Gallerie Vienna/Baltic Gateshead (2024-25). His monograph, Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects, was published by Routledge in 2021. He is the editor of an upcoming collection of essays on LGBTQ+ Monuments and Remembrance in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2027).