Little Monsters: Race, Sovereignty, and Queer Inhumanism in Beasts of the Southern Wild

This essay uses the 2012 film Beasts of the Southern Wild to investigate the lingering investments in race and sovereignty that one encounters in fables of queer rewilding. Exploring the genealogy of the mythical aurochs as it is reanimated in both dramatic and eugenic contexts, the essay queries the burden of fabulation that the film places on its youthful protagonist. This burden restages the scene of engulfment through which racialized bodies and indigenous territories are dispossessed by and for white settlement.