Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies

In these bold, original essays written against a slew of hardened academic orthodoxies, Sam See shows his work to have been radically ahead of its time. Recovering an underexamined mode of queer aesthetics grounded in nature and myth running through the heart of modernism, See's incisive readings of Darwin, Wilde, Woolf, Hughes, Eliot, Hemingway, and others are nothing less than field-changing. Thank you, Chris Looby and Michael North, and also the writers of the insightful companion essays, for this eagerly-awaited collection of works by a brilliant and fearless critic: one willing to revisit categories in which so many of us were taught to feel ashamed of showing interest, in order to bring sex back into the aesthetic and the aesthetic back into sex.---Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago Sam See's stunningly original and profoundly generative essays urge us to recognize the queerness of nature and the critical role of myth making in queer community formation. Brilliant, supple, deeply learned, and wide-ranging, the essays bear witness to the powerful mind and generous spirit we lost far too soon.---George Chauncey, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History, Columbia University In Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies, Sam See upends queer theory's emphasis on social construction and its suspicion of an innate queerness. Instead, he argues that it is possible to frame queerness as a nature without capitulating to the sexological thinking that positioned sexual difference as a degenerate threat... If this was work See could not finish in a life cut abruptly short, it is work that we, as inheritors, can extend. In part, that continuation is the nature of scholarship. But it is perhaps even more a part of the mythos of queerness to imagine new worlds--especially from the fragments of thought that our peers, much like their predecessors, leave in their absence to our interpretation.---Will Clark, ASAP Journal