Offering a model for meaningful dialogue between queer studies and environmental studies, Robert Azzarello's book traces a queer-environmental lineage in American Romantic and post-Romantic literature. Azzarello challenges the notion that reading environmental literature is unsatisfying in terms of aesthetics and proposes an understanding of literary environmentalism that is rich in poetic complexity. With the term "queer environmentality," Azzarello points towards a queer sensibility in the history of environmental literature to balance the dominant narrative that reading environmental literature is tantamount to witnessing a spectacular dramatization of heterosexual teleology. Azzarello's study treats four key figures in the American literary tradition: Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Willa Cather, and Djuna Barnes. Each of these writers problematizes conventional notions of the strange matrix between the human, the natural, and the sexual. They brilliantly demonstrate the ways in which the queer project and the environmental project are always connected or, put another way, show that questions and politics of human sexuality are always entwined with those associated with the other-than-human world.

What might it mean to queer the Human? By extension, how is the Human employed within queer theory? These questions invite a reconsideration of the way we think about queer theory, the category of the Human and the act of queering itself. This interdisciplinary volume of essays gathers together essays by international pioneering scholars in queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies and science studies who have written on topics as diverse as Christ, the Antichrist, dogs, starfish, werewolves, vampires, murderous dolls, cartoons, corpses, bacteria, nanoengineering, biomesis, the incest taboo, the death drive and the 'queer' in queer theory. Contributors include Robert Azzarello, Karen Barad, Phillip A. Bernhardt-House, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Claire Colebrook, Noreen Giffney, Judith Halberstam, Donna J. Haraway, Eva Hayward, Myra J. Hird, Karalyn Kendall, Vicki Kirby, Alice Kuzniar, Patricia MacCormack, Robert Mills, Luciana Parisi and Erin Runions.

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