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.

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