An intersectional analysis of our robotic future

beyond an epistemological orientation to the world. Either way,Wild Things contributes directly to other projects in cultural studies that defy political classification by reaching for what is currently unimaginable. For instance, Paul Gilroy’s Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) dares to imagine a world no longer constrained by binary, racial logics, even as he is careful to forefront the contemporary necessity of racial solidarity between people of colour against the oppressive, white empire. Halberstam seems to be doing something similar. Despite wildness historically being deployed to justify subjugation, enslavement, and genocide, Halberstam still dares to challenge its condemnation.Wild Things’ conception of wildness is constantly deployed in relation to specific cultural projects and artifacts, like Where the Wild Things Are and the constraints of sexual classification. Through Halberstam’s examination of pop culture and political projects, his analysis is consistently brought back to racial tropes that define the socio-political state of colonialism today. Both the book’s embeddedness in this context and its willingness to radically imagine other possibilities, make it a significant contribution to cultural studies. ThoughWild Things does not offer a blueprint to enacting a ‘wild’ social world, it would be unfair to levy that as a damning critique against this book. An epistemology of the wild appears initially impossible to concretize in this way, but Halberstam dares his readers to try anyways. Far beyond a mere intellectual experiment, these epistemologies would make survival and existence possible for experiences between conceptions of the normative and the wild. By not limiting itself to linear notions of progress,Wild Things is a reminder that critical scholarship’s penchant for world-making and un-making is a political imperative to thinking beyond our hegemonic constraints.