Beasts in the Mississippi Jungle: Ike McCaslin's Queer Animal Kinship
Location
Nutt Auditorium
Start Date
21-7-2019 4:00 PM
Description
Using Michael Lundblad's work on animality (based on the popularization of Freud and Darwin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that changed the relationship between humans and non-human animals by fundamentally questioning human exceptionalism) , I examine how Ike's fantasy of Sam Fathers' Indianness allows him to construct an alternative spirit animal genealogy in an attempt 1) to repress what he knows very well (the existence of his black kin) and 2) to preserve a sense of his heteronormativity, perversely predicated on the exclusion of women. However, Faulkner's material animals refuse to conform to an instinctive heterosexuality. Looking particularly at the interspecies companionship of Boon and Lion, I tease out the ways that their love turns into a male three-way of death and desire with Old Ben that troubles Ike's attempt to deny the various open secrets surrounding his family relations.
Relational Format
Conference proceeding
Recommended Citation
Duvall, John N., "Beasts in the Mississippi Jungle: Ike McCaslin's Queer Animal Kinship" (2019). Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. 3.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/fy/2019/schedule/3
Beasts in the Mississippi Jungle: Ike McCaslin's Queer Animal Kinship
Nutt Auditorium
Using Michael Lundblad's work on animality (based on the popularization of Freud and Darwin during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that changed the relationship between humans and non-human animals by fundamentally questioning human exceptionalism) , I examine how Ike's fantasy of Sam Fathers' Indianness allows him to construct an alternative spirit animal genealogy in an attempt 1) to repress what he knows very well (the existence of his black kin) and 2) to preserve a sense of his heteronormativity, perversely predicated on the exclusion of women. However, Faulkner's material animals refuse to conform to an instinctive heterosexuality. Looking particularly at the interspecies companionship of Boon and Lion, I tease out the ways that their love turns into a male three-way of death and desire with Old Ben that troubles Ike's attempt to deny the various open secrets surrounding his family relations.