The Wild Not Less Than the Good
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3657705 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Peter Coviello (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 509-532 |
| Publication date | 2017-10-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1064-2684 • E-ISSN: 1527-9375 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/10642684-4157499 |
| OpenAlex | W2761503001 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 32 |
What does sex radicalism look like-for queer theory but not only queer theory-in a critical dispensation tuned less to the liberatory promises of sex than to matters of biopower? This article takes up Henry David Thoreau's vexed relation to the ascetic imperatives of nineteenth-century capitalism in the context of his determination, as he says in Walden, to "love the wild not less than the good." It tracks Thoreau's interest in the wild as part of his career-wide effort to imagine carnal life away from the forms of biopolitical coding and optimization that he understood to be captivating his body more and more completely. As against these imperatives of maximized bodily instrumentalization-crosswired to whiteness, labor, reproductivity-Thoreau tests out the possibilities of a more errant carnality, a "wildness" that, I argue, both is and is not an expression of what, by the end of the nineteenth century, would be called "sexuality." Doing so, he helps us bring into focus some of the knotty conceptual dilemmas of our own queer theoretical moment, in which the impulse to nurture traditions of sex radicalism sits sometimes uneasily alongside renderings of sex as a key element of imperial racialization and biopoliticized control
Aesthetics · Androgyny · Context (archaeology · Human sexuality · Masculinity · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Queer · Queer theory · Sociology · Wildness · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Borges, Kipling, and Jewish Identity · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philosophy · Thoreau and American Literature
How to Do the History of Homosexuality
Social Death
The Environmental Imagination
Ghosts of Futures Past
Desiring Arabs
Manifesting America
Arranging grief
Golden Gulag
Unlimited Intimacy
Formations of the Secular
Society Must Be Defended’
Scales of Reading
The Security Archipelago
Terrorist Assemblages
Safe Space
Surface Reading
Introduction
Habits of Leaking
Little Monsters
There's Nothing Revolutionary about a Blowjob
Go Gaga
Spaces between Us
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women
Vibrant Matter
Necropolitics
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,5 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2024 (3) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |