What do you think?
Rate this book
Perverse Modernities
Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire
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.
240 pages, Paperback
Published October 29, 2020
55 people are currently reading
904 people want to read
About the author
J. Jack Halberstam
31 books583 followersJack Halberstam (born December 15, 1961), also known as Judith Halberstam, is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies, and Comparative Literature, as well as serving as the Director of The Center for Feminist Research at University of Southern California (USC). Halberstam was the Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at San Diego before working at USC. He is a gender and queer theorist and author.
Halberstam, who accepts masculine and feminine pronouns, as well as the name "Judith," with regard to his gender identity, focuses on the topic of tomboys and female masculinity for his writings. His 1998 Female Masculinity book discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem" with outlining the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein.
Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures in the United States and internationally on queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on fascism and (homo)sexuality.
Halberstam, who accepts masculine and feminine pronouns, as well as the name "Judith," with regard to his gender identity, focuses on the topic of tomboys and female masculinity for his writings. His 1998 Female Masculinity book discusses a common by-product of gender binarism, termed "the bathroom problem" with outlining the dangerous and awkward dilemma of a perceived gender deviant's justification of presence in a gender-policed zone, such as a public bathroom, and the identity implications of "passing" therein.
Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures in the United States and internationally on queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film and animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book on fascism and (homo)sexuality.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
November 22, 2024
if jack halberstam has no fans it’s because im dead. i love this dude and his slay fucking theories and funny jokes. what a legend
April 26, 2021
Halberstam's book Wild Things looks at the relationship between our ideas of desire and wildness. It is a sophisticated text filled with a range of examples ranging from Maurice Sendak's, Where the Wild Things Are to the film, Life of Pi. Halberstam's writing is always intersectional, showing the relationship between colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia and how categories of the other and wildness are created by those who write these texts. The book is important for anyone interested in categories of desire.
"This book takes the wild instead as an epistemology, a terrain of alternative formulations that resist the orderly impulses of modernity and as a merging of anticolonial, anticapitalist, and radical queer interests." x
"The wild, I learned too late, is not a place you can go, a site you can visit; it cannot be willed into being, left behind, lost or found. The wild limns our experience of time and place, past and present, and beckons us to a future we will never know." xii
"Wild Things makes the case for considering modern sexuality as a discursive force that runs in several directions at once-toward the consolidation of self within the modern period, away from the rituals and prohibitions of religious belief, and toward indeterminate modes of embodiment. In terms of what Michel Foucault called "the history of sexuality," queer bodies reenter the symbolic order through a "reverse discourse" whereby they fashion both classification and rejection into selfhood."6
"Wildness is all at once what we were, what we have become, and what we will be or, even, what we will cease to be in the event of postural climate collapse...Wildness has no goal, no point of liberation that beckons off in the distance, no shape that must be assumed, no outcome that must be desire. Wildness, instead, disorders desire and desire disorder." 7
"The unruly lives of the lost, the lonely, and the lunatic call their hellos from what Foucault calls "the other side of all the things that are." The wild, like nature, we could say with Foucault, can longer be good." 15
"While late nineteenth century science, psychology, and literature found ways to classify new forms of human behaviour and interaction, some bodies, many bodies, fell outside of those classifications and remained in the wild, so to speak, beyond the human zoo, inexplicable, discomforting, shocking, exploitable, displayable. This language of wildness, zoos, expertise, scientific observation, and the definitional capture of forms of embodiment, however, describes a larger orbit of exclusion and fetishistic fixing than that of the genteel and aristocratic world of Stephen Gordon and Oscar Wilde." 24-25
"As Fanon articulated, Blackness, on account of its very specific relation to property, has been situated as a realm of "value," to use Lindon Barrett's terminology, that limns enlightenment principles with their negative reflection. Not simply the slave to a master nor darkness to light, Blackness, within a white imaginary, must be pressed into the service of negation itself." 26
"It also demonstrated how necessary an institutive connection between Blackness and wildness might be fore the legitimation of state violence." 27
"Bewilderment, the process of becoming wild by shedding knowledge (as opposed to becoming civilized by acquiring), offers both escape and madness, desire and disorder." 31
"It is within the epistomologies established by colonial encounters, by colonial brutality, and by a colonial will to know that the wild is established as a space of otherness, of primitive anteriority, and as Indigenous knowledge ripe for the taking. In its encounter with imaginary wild people, the colonial project confronts very different understandings of body, life, magic, science, value, and resources and attempts to eliminate them wielding the tools of ethnography (writing indignity into the past), law (legislating possessive investments in land and resources), and guns (eradicating what could not be fixed)." 38
"And so, Taussig's book itself cannot escape the binary it challenges, and too often Taussig himself, like so many other writers who attempt to immerse themselves in the idiom of an imaginary otherness (Conrad, just to give the most obvious example), actually reproduces the colonial terms of encounter within which a wild other embodies the unknown, the magical, and the antidote to the ills of Euro-American cultural values." 39
"When Marlow descended into the heart of darkness, he found the savagery he went to confront in the form of Kurtz, the colonial administrator who has not simply "gone native" or wild but who has, in his managerial madness, transacted the precise terms of what Taussig calls "the colonial mirror of production"..."The terror and the tortures they devised mirrored the horror of the savagery they both feared and fictionalized." 42
"Queer wildness, accordingly, inherits this ambivalence that inheres to the mirror of colonial production-it always runs the risk of reproducing the terms that it seeks to displace." 46
"Like Taussig, Byrd describes a mirroring relation between settler colonial discourses and the epistemologies they come to destroy. And, so, Byrd uses the notion of "cacophonies of colonialism" (xxvii to describe the contradictory materials levied by colonial masters against other civilizations in the form of the Native peoples they are about to conquer. Colonialism, for Byrd, is a violent clash of cultures, systems, and peoples that "creates shockwaves that ripple outward from the collision in time, space and popular culture" (xxvii)...While the colonial narrative wants to smooth out the dissonance of cacophonous encounters by vertically projecting violence, noise, and savagery onto the other and claiming a rational certitude for itself, Byrd makes cacophony into a horizontal landscape of cultural collision. And so, what the colonizer cannot understand, what he is bewildered by, becomes the source of chaos and noise and represents a chaotic world of ungovernable peoples-exactly the mis-en-scene of The Rite." 69
"Rosenberg reminds us that the difference between animals we love and animals we eat is not about companionship, but about capital." 122
"And that, furthermore, the same systems of classification invented by Carl Linnaeus to know and master the so-called natural world produced, at the same time, a shadow system of classification for the unnatural, the racially diverse, the unproductive, and the criminal." 123
"Sendak saw childhood not as an experience of "sweetness and light," but as a dark experience of anger and rage as well as cruelty." 133
"If Frankenstein's monster represented an early nineteenth-century fear of hybridity and untrammelled scientific experimentation, not to mention concern about multitudes and the power of feminine creativity, by the end of the nineteenth century it was the vampire that came to stand for, all at once, popular unrest, threats to national identity posed by immigrant populations, forms of perverse sexuality, and new forms of capitalism that sucked the life out of everything...The popularity of the metaphor of the zombie, not to mention zombie films and TV shows, evidences deep anxiety in contemporary Euro-American culture over things that refuse to dies, on the one hand, and things that occupy the realm between life and death, on the other other. As medicine seeks to extend life beyond the body's actual capacity-think pacemakers for example-and as debates over abortion remain intractable over the status of the unborn child in relation to the category of life, the boundary between life and death becomes porous in new ways. In addition, the daily news of disappearing species, of new viruses and threats to complex ecosystems, puts the larger category of life into question and raises the possibility that earth is already in a zombified condition of living death." 148
"And the pet, I will propose, is only the latest creature we have rendered as a prosthetic extension of our mortal bodies. As an accessory, a fetish, an improper object of love and intimacy...the pet is a zombified figure of the blurred boundaries between life and death in contemporary culture." 150
"Contemporary obsessions with zombie forms, like nineteenth century obsessions with vampires, recognizes in this monstrous form the end of era, and if the era in question at the close of the nineteenth century was a form of capitalism, as the twenty-first century mints its own monstrous symbolism, the end it imagines is not of an era, but of the human itself." 173
"This book takes the wild instead as an epistemology, a terrain of alternative formulations that resist the orderly impulses of modernity and as a merging of anticolonial, anticapitalist, and radical queer interests." x
"The wild, I learned too late, is not a place you can go, a site you can visit; it cannot be willed into being, left behind, lost or found. The wild limns our experience of time and place, past and present, and beckons us to a future we will never know." xii
"Wild Things makes the case for considering modern sexuality as a discursive force that runs in several directions at once-toward the consolidation of self within the modern period, away from the rituals and prohibitions of religious belief, and toward indeterminate modes of embodiment. In terms of what Michel Foucault called "the history of sexuality," queer bodies reenter the symbolic order through a "reverse discourse" whereby they fashion both classification and rejection into selfhood."6
"Wildness is all at once what we were, what we have become, and what we will be or, even, what we will cease to be in the event of postural climate collapse...Wildness has no goal, no point of liberation that beckons off in the distance, no shape that must be assumed, no outcome that must be desire. Wildness, instead, disorders desire and desire disorder." 7
"The unruly lives of the lost, the lonely, and the lunatic call their hellos from what Foucault calls "the other side of all the things that are." The wild, like nature, we could say with Foucault, can longer be good." 15
"While late nineteenth century science, psychology, and literature found ways to classify new forms of human behaviour and interaction, some bodies, many bodies, fell outside of those classifications and remained in the wild, so to speak, beyond the human zoo, inexplicable, discomforting, shocking, exploitable, displayable. This language of wildness, zoos, expertise, scientific observation, and the definitional capture of forms of embodiment, however, describes a larger orbit of exclusion and fetishistic fixing than that of the genteel and aristocratic world of Stephen Gordon and Oscar Wilde." 24-25
"As Fanon articulated, Blackness, on account of its very specific relation to property, has been situated as a realm of "value," to use Lindon Barrett's terminology, that limns enlightenment principles with their negative reflection. Not simply the slave to a master nor darkness to light, Blackness, within a white imaginary, must be pressed into the service of negation itself." 26
"It also demonstrated how necessary an institutive connection between Blackness and wildness might be fore the legitimation of state violence." 27
"Bewilderment, the process of becoming wild by shedding knowledge (as opposed to becoming civilized by acquiring), offers both escape and madness, desire and disorder." 31
"It is within the epistomologies established by colonial encounters, by colonial brutality, and by a colonial will to know that the wild is established as a space of otherness, of primitive anteriority, and as Indigenous knowledge ripe for the taking. In its encounter with imaginary wild people, the colonial project confronts very different understandings of body, life, magic, science, value, and resources and attempts to eliminate them wielding the tools of ethnography (writing indignity into the past), law (legislating possessive investments in land and resources), and guns (eradicating what could not be fixed)." 38
"And so, Taussig's book itself cannot escape the binary it challenges, and too often Taussig himself, like so many other writers who attempt to immerse themselves in the idiom of an imaginary otherness (Conrad, just to give the most obvious example), actually reproduces the colonial terms of encounter within which a wild other embodies the unknown, the magical, and the antidote to the ills of Euro-American cultural values." 39
"When Marlow descended into the heart of darkness, he found the savagery he went to confront in the form of Kurtz, the colonial administrator who has not simply "gone native" or wild but who has, in his managerial madness, transacted the precise terms of what Taussig calls "the colonial mirror of production"..."The terror and the tortures they devised mirrored the horror of the savagery they both feared and fictionalized." 42
"Queer wildness, accordingly, inherits this ambivalence that inheres to the mirror of colonial production-it always runs the risk of reproducing the terms that it seeks to displace." 46
"Like Taussig, Byrd describes a mirroring relation between settler colonial discourses and the epistemologies they come to destroy. And, so, Byrd uses the notion of "cacophonies of colonialism" (xxvii to describe the contradictory materials levied by colonial masters against other civilizations in the form of the Native peoples they are about to conquer. Colonialism, for Byrd, is a violent clash of cultures, systems, and peoples that "creates shockwaves that ripple outward from the collision in time, space and popular culture" (xxvii)...While the colonial narrative wants to smooth out the dissonance of cacophonous encounters by vertically projecting violence, noise, and savagery onto the other and claiming a rational certitude for itself, Byrd makes cacophony into a horizontal landscape of cultural collision. And so, what the colonizer cannot understand, what he is bewildered by, becomes the source of chaos and noise and represents a chaotic world of ungovernable peoples-exactly the mis-en-scene of The Rite." 69
"Rosenberg reminds us that the difference between animals we love and animals we eat is not about companionship, but about capital." 122
"And that, furthermore, the same systems of classification invented by Carl Linnaeus to know and master the so-called natural world produced, at the same time, a shadow system of classification for the unnatural, the racially diverse, the unproductive, and the criminal." 123
"Sendak saw childhood not as an experience of "sweetness and light," but as a dark experience of anger and rage as well as cruelty." 133
"If Frankenstein's monster represented an early nineteenth-century fear of hybridity and untrammelled scientific experimentation, not to mention concern about multitudes and the power of feminine creativity, by the end of the nineteenth century it was the vampire that came to stand for, all at once, popular unrest, threats to national identity posed by immigrant populations, forms of perverse sexuality, and new forms of capitalism that sucked the life out of everything...The popularity of the metaphor of the zombie, not to mention zombie films and TV shows, evidences deep anxiety in contemporary Euro-American culture over things that refuse to dies, on the one hand, and things that occupy the realm between life and death, on the other other. As medicine seeks to extend life beyond the body's actual capacity-think pacemakers for example-and as debates over abortion remain intractable over the status of the unborn child in relation to the category of life, the boundary between life and death becomes porous in new ways. In addition, the daily news of disappearing species, of new viruses and threats to complex ecosystems, puts the larger category of life into question and raises the possibility that earth is already in a zombified condition of living death." 148
"And the pet, I will propose, is only the latest creature we have rendered as a prosthetic extension of our mortal bodies. As an accessory, a fetish, an improper object of love and intimacy...the pet is a zombified figure of the blurred boundaries between life and death in contemporary culture." 150
"Contemporary obsessions with zombie forms, like nineteenth century obsessions with vampires, recognizes in this monstrous form the end of era, and if the era in question at the close of the nineteenth century was a form of capitalism, as the twenty-first century mints its own monstrous symbolism, the end it imagines is not of an era, but of the human itself." 173
September 15, 2024
Más loca que antes pero menos que mañana
November 4, 2024
Netzat ikuspegi antropologikoegia da pixkat luzea in zait. Baitare oso referenziala XX. mendeko testu zientifikoei. Halare ideia oso interesgarria da basatia eta erotikan inguruko haunarketa desberdiñak guay
April 5, 2023
Of course, these ideas on taxonomies and border-making between the wild and civilized/self/human/subject/etc. blew my mind. Eminently readable, drawing from such unexpected corners as Eliot (!), Kate Bush, animated children's movies, and Polish narrative film, it rushes all over to ask what is queer about wildness, what is wild about queerness, yet features almost no "queer" subjects as such. Just this approach to the archive alone, blending high and low art, institutional and popular regimes of knowledge is so permissive and expansive. I'm thoroughly inspired to apply these lessons to my own writing about the development of affects toward certain plants and landscapes as irredeemably wild and then totally redeemable. Halberstam is a gift to the universe. They're warm and accessible and not afraid to take some extreme positions, especially about the alienated emotional labor of exploited pets. Whenever I hear them speak, I'm filled with a big YES.
January 24, 2021
REVIEW FORTHCOMING IN Ancillary Review of Books
September 17, 2023
Wild Things: the disorder of desire challenges one relationship to earth, land, animals and plant life as we know it. Through metaphors of wild predators, falcons, beasts, zombies, household pets and the ocean, he offers a complex ideology where we need the earth, the earth doesn’t need us. There are moments of taboo, questions of desire, sexuality involving children and animals relating to a queer, bipoc and racial orientation as other. Yet, I am looking for meaning around transgender post-identity outside of the overwhelming queer continuum. Where are those voices in academia?
It seems to me, and maybe Halberstam would agree, First Nations, Metis and Inuit have long held this knowledge, theory and practices that could save the planet and heal the earth, animals and plants, yet First Nations barely get credited. I’m not saying Halberstam falls into this trap, what I am saying is, where is the two spirit discourse of “the wild”? Yes, Kent Monkman has a moment however limited it is.
It seems to me, and maybe Halberstam would agree, First Nations, Metis and Inuit have long held this knowledge, theory and practices that could save the planet and heal the earth, animals and plants, yet First Nations barely get credited. I’m not saying Halberstam falls into this trap, what I am saying is, where is the two spirit discourse of “the wild”? Yes, Kent Monkman has a moment however limited it is.
October 31, 2024
i read most of this for an essay i wrote early this year and may or may not read the last few chapters < / 3 my uni library doesn’t have ebook version so i was reading it irl at state library ……. so look im marking it as read. again, thorough genius from baddie ! i love them ! i feel like i still preferred some of their musings on wildness and ecologies in interviews but i still really enjoyed ! especially the points on oscar wilde at the beginning about artifice/nature really interesting…. also never not thinking about their presentation on how fucked pets are at queer ppt fuck i love them yipeeeee
August 23, 2021
Great
Like al of Halberstam’s works since and includingThe Queer Art of Failure, this was engrossing to read and dissect. Most likely it will take a rereading for me to fully grasp the ideas presented here.
Like al of Halberstam’s works since and includingThe Queer Art of Failure, this was engrossing to read and dissect. Most likely it will take a rereading for me to fully grasp the ideas presented here.
December 23, 2025
oh god idk, super cool and all but at times incomprehensible (to me - probably because i dont fuck with Nietzsche like that), and im not so sure the chapter about zombies made sense within the context of this book even though it was a solid chapter, very fun to read.
August 19, 2021
Brilliant and engaging, as always.
Read
October 7, 2024This was really interesting! Touched on so many topics all related back to wildness.
Read
May 1, 2025holy shit i need to read this over and over, halbertsam understands the fictionalisation of queer theory and the relationship between the tamed and untamed.
May 21, 2025
muy interesante, pero a veces siempre me ocurre que veo análisis unidos a la premisa del libro por un hilo muy fino... Y algunos argumentos no me convencen, pero weno
May 21, 2025
me esperaba algo diferente ( le entendi al señor d la librería que iba sobre zombis y lo queer)
July 6, 2025
heel literair maar heeeeel boeiend. fijn spel met taal etc
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews