Title: Living Spaces: Reimaging Environments of Desire
Abstract: Contemporary queer theory has been thoroughly reexamining the boundaries and limitations controlling our desires. One especially crucial view worth considering is Jack Halberstam's examination of queer desire and the non-human in his Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020). In his book he draws out how access to the wild allows for a complete freedom
from human social norms and restrictions on desire. By examining various falconers and their desires for wildness, Halberstam pushes back against heteronormative and colonial conceptions of desire, nature, and civilization. Mobilizing a Halberstamian reading of the novels Dawn (1987) by Octavia Butler and Paradise Rot (2018) by Jenny Hval, I aim to propose that both imagine radical new ways of recognizing the inherent agency of our environment in shaping and directing our desires. Destabilizing the bonds of domesticity and colonial ideology, we are presented with living environments that the characters engage with in ways that radically reshape their sexual desires and activities. Reading these two novels together through the lens
of the wild provided by Halberstam I hope to consider imaginaries where animate spaces allow for wild desires and spaces of resistance towards heteronormative and colonial ways of conceptualizing desire and space.
Bionote: Nikita Prokhorov is a philosophy PhD student at the University of California, Irvine working as an epistemologist of multi/inter-species interactions and enactivist accounts of cognition. Operating within the field of critical plant studies, Nikita's primary projects center on deanthropocentrizing concepts of intelligence and agency with respect to vegetal beings utilizing novel readings of Wittgensteinian philosophy of language and epistemology.