Introduction

The idea of “holding space” for hard feelings is a wellness culture cliché in the 2020s. “Holding space” means creating a safe and comfortable zone for someone to express, process and purge negative affects and emotions. The feeling might be anger, grief, shame, fear or a combination of all of them; it might be felt in the self or in relation to others. The space held open could be in home, a park, a clinic, a classroom, a community hall. When done well, holding space allows someone to express hard feelings and continue to live comfortably within the limitations or enabling constraints of their circumstances. Holding space is an act of care that allows for a difficult affective process to unfold.

A tragedy creates a spatial and temporal zone for the representation of a story about the expression of negative human emotions too. These are often big, incorrigible, and negative ones. In addition, because it is a tragedy the space is held badly in the sense that circumstances are intended to go awry. As a queer feminist ecocritic interested in the representation of affect as it relates to environmental questions, I’m not just seeking to point out that things go badly in tragedies, but more specifically in the granular details of how, and how it might be otherwise.