Queer Austringers. Helen Macdonald Reads T. H. White
Queer Austringers. Helen Macdonald Reads T. H. White

Summary/Abstract: In 2014, Helen Macdonald published a bestselling non-fiction text, H Is forHawk. Building upon an inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks,she offered to the readers a compelling presentation of her personal journey of mourningafter the death of her father, parallel to a rebellious maturation in the margin of culturalnormativities. The relation between the austringer, that is, the keeper of goshawks, andthe bird of prey is presented not only as a process of introspection and healing, but alsoof 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) humanand (actualized) non-human relationships. This triple line of experience counters anddeconstructs the narration of the dominant heterosexual male as a hunter and introducesa maternal element into the interspecies relationship.

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