Published: 2024-10-21

Queer Austringers. Helen Macdonald Reads T. H. White

Ewa A. Łukaszyk Logo ORCID
Section: biografie - świadectwa - konteksty
https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.15844

Abstract

In 2014, Helen Macdonald published a bestselling non-fiction text, H Is for Hawk. Building upon an inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks, she offered to the readers a compelling presentation of her personal journey of mourning after the death of her father, parallel to a rebellious maturation in the margin of cultural normativities. The relation between the austringer, that is, the keeper of goshawks, and the bird of prey is presented not only as a process of introspection and healing, but also of almost complete identification with the non-human partner. In parallel to this experience, Macdonald reads the personal history of yet another traumatised austringer, the homosexual author T. H. White. She builds thus a triangle of (mediated) human and (actualized) non-human relationships. This triple line of experience counters and deconstructs the narration of the dominant heterosexual male as a hunter and introduces a maternal element into the interspecies relationship.

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Łukaszyk, E. A. (2024). Queer Austringers. Helen Macdonald Reads T. H. White. Er(r)go. Theory - Literature - Culture, (49), 119–135. https://doi.org/10.31261/errgo.15844

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No. 49 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-30


ISSN: 1508-6305
eISSN: 2544-3186
Ikona DOI 10.31261/errgo

Publisher
University of Silesia Press | Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego i Wydawnictwo Naukowe "Śląsk"

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