Description:
Queer Natures, Queer Mythologies collects in two parts the scholarly work--both published and unpublished--that Sam See had completed as of his death in 2013.
In Part I, in a thorough reading of Darwin, See argues that nature is constantly and aimlessly variable, and that nature itself might be considered queer. In Part II, See proposes that, understood as queer in this way, nature might be made the foundational myth for the building of queer communities. With essays by Scott Herring, Heather Love, and Wendy Moffat.Brief description: Sam See was a scholar of Modernist literature and sexuality studies and Assistant Professor of English at Yale University.
Review Quotes: 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