Something borrowed, something new: navigating the emerging field of queer disaster studies

This chapter presents a brief history of the research, policy and practice that have informed the emergence of gender and sexual diversity in disasters, climate change and humanitarian crises, or ‘queer disaster studies’ in short. It explores critiques of the dominance of western terminology and practices in the development of queer disaster studies; the emerging field’s debt to feminist and queer theorists and HIV/AIDS community activists; and the important role played by the queering of human geography. The chapter poses disaster justice as a framework that can draw together the culturally and geographically disparate work that has been conducted on queer disaster studies within and across different sectors and disciplines.