"The carnage in the woods": Queerness and Interspecies Violence in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy

abstract:Considerations of the queer thematics of McCarthy's work remain scant, and interpretations of the novels of the Border Trilogy—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—commonly elide the presence of queer affect. At the same time, theorizations of violence in McCarthy's novels are abundant. Through reading interspecies violence as an expression of queer desire, this article exposes the centrality of queerness to the function and production of violence in the Border Trilogy. I contend that the queer presences in the Border Trilogy produce new insights into our reading of interspecies violence and creates nuance in our understanding of the relationship between transgressive desire and violence in McCarthy's wider corpus.