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 *
