"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."
Edge Effects - Julia Dauer
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.
European Journal of American Studies - Constantine Chatzipapatheodoridis
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.
Cultural Studies - Jake Kyer Townsend
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.
Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect - Mel Y. Chen
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.
Influx and Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whitman - Jane Bennett
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.
Transgender Studies Quarterly - Nicholas Tyler Reich
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.
08/10/2020
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. (Oct.)
"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" (8/1/2021 12:00:00 AM)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" (10/13/2021 12:00:00 AM)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" (2/2/2021 12:00:00 AM)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" (11/28/2020 12:00:00 AM)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"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"
