Wild Things
The Disorder of Desire
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Halberstam (The Queer Art of Failure), a professor of English and gender studies, leverages expertise in both areas in this creative, discipline-smashing study exploring the human attraction to "the wild." Halberstam defines the wild as "a challenge to an assumed order of things from, by, and on behalf of things that refuse and resist order itself." Using texts and artifacts as varied as T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, the work of Canadian artist Kent Monkman, the picture book Where the Wild Things Are, and the animated movie The Secret Life of Pets, Halberstam shows how exploring the wild can expand and critique worldviews. Regarding gender studies, the author proposes "wildness" as a way to move beyond rigid conceptions of sexuality and gender. In general, Halberstam proposes exploring the wild as a way to escape the "tight webs made up of race, class, gender, and sexuality." The book also suggests that this draw to the wild is distorted by pet ownership, which Halberstam criticizes as a form of "living death" for the pet. 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.
