About the Book
In Wild Things Jack Halberstam offers an alternative history of sexuality by tracing the ways in which wildness has been associated with queerness and queer bodies throughout the twentieth century. Halberstam theorizes the wild as an unbounded and unpredictable space that offers sources of opposition to modernity's orderly impulses. Wildness illuminates the normative taxonomies of sexuality against which radical queer practice and politics operate. Throughout, Halberstam engages with a wide variety of texts, practices, and cultural imaginaries-from zombies, falconry, and M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! to Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are and the career of Irish anticolonial revolutionary Roger Casement-to demonstrate how wildness provides the means to know and to be in ways that transgress Euro-American notions of the modern liberal subject. With Wild Things, Halberstam opens new possibilities for queer theory and for wild thinking more broadly.
Table of Contents:
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Part I. Sex in the Wild
Introduction. Sex before, after, and against Nature 3
1. Wildness, Loss, and Death 33
2. "A New Kind of Wildness": The Rite of Spring and and Indigenous Aesthetics of Bewilderment 51
3. The Epistemology of the Ferox: Sex, Death, and Falconry 77
Part II. Animality
Introduction. Into the Wild 115
4. Where the Wild Things Are: Humans, Animals, and Children 125
5. Zombie Antihumanism at the End of the World 147
Conclusions. The Ninth Wave 175
Notes 181
Bibliography 201
Index 211
About the Author :
Jack Halberstam is Professor of English and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of several books, including The Queer Art of Failure and Female Masculinity, both also published by Duke University Press, and Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability.
Review :
“Where can the wild take you? With Jack Halberstam as guide, to places fabulous, cruel, soaring, undead, hilarious, dark, seductive, promising, nonprovidential. Wild Things is a brilliant phenomenology of the (more than) human condition of bewilderment. Its critique of invocations of wildness tethered to colonial, racist fantasies also marks how the figure can contribute to forms of desire bent toward the feral, the incipient, the otherwise. Wild Things is an awesome trip.” - Jane Bennett, author of (Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman) “How does one learn about wildness? Coming from a longtime scholar of sexuality, the animal, desire, and anarchy, Jack Halberstam's Wild Things fosters a generous archive, favoring bewilderment over a ritual turn back to order and knowing. Following this book constitutes a kind of epistemological travel and culminates in a habit of sensation, a disorderly campaign, and a queer method that will stay with you.” - Mel Y. Chen, author of (Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect) "[A] creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to 'the wild.' . . . Halberstam’s approach is equal parts academic and poetic, making for a dense and, at times, beautiful text. This is a work that demands attention, which it rewards with both insight and entertainment." (Publishers Weekly) “In Wild Things Halberstam moves restlessly across literature, cinema, theater, music, and poetry, determining the various modes by which people have devoted themselves to, or been effectively written within, the incomprehensibilities of the wild, of wildness, and of bewilderment…. Wild Things (un)clarifies the wild as an always-present threat to modernity’s coherence, illuminating the anti-Black and heteronormative carceral logics at the heart of liberal democracy by unveiling those under common ways of knowing and being that liberalism seeks to obscure, incorporate, lock up, or destroy.” (Invisible Culture) "The limits of Halberstam's analysis are boundlessly educative and entertaining: one chapter calls out proto-queer male writers for their affinity and identification with feral falconry while another examines the nature of family pets. Within the realms of what the author himself calls a 'counterintuitive queer project,' Halberstam's intellectually engrossing phenomenology evokes thoughts of how the concept of 'wild' can be applied to creatures and concepts both great and small while inspiring spirited conversation and debate." - Jim Piechota (Bay Area Reporter) "Wild Things offers readers and scholars working on environmental questions a vibrant archive for thinking histories of sexuality and desire alongside concepts of the “wild” and its disorders. . . . The text is especially rich as an archive of the ways wildness persists within and can be activated against modernist writers. Halberstam’s wildness is a morally ambivalent, non-identitarian invitation-one that might lead to bewilderment, zombies, children’s books, hawks, or any number of other queer, wild things." - Julia Dauer (Edge Effects) “Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today.... Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.” - Jake Kyer Townsend (Cultural Studies) “The book’s first half is a remarkable example of ecstatic intellectual curiosity, flying high on seemingly perpendicular currents Halberstam teaches us to navigate with smooth and logical flow. . . . Halberstam wrote exactly the wild book he set out to write.” - Nicholas Tyler Reich (Transgender Studies Quarterly) “With regard to queer topics, Halberstam has been an influential figure in modern queer theory and Wild Things attests to this status as it is steadfastly grounded in the scholarship of the field. . . . The author does not simply connect wildness with queerness, but braids the two strands of theory together thus expanding their discursive potential.” - Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis (European Journal of American Studies)
