# McHugh, ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’, 2009 > [!cite] > McHugh, Susan. ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’. *GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies*, vol. 15, no. 1 (2009), pp. 153–169. [https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-022](https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2008-022). > [!abstract] > Nonhuman non-heteronormativity presents a profound challenge not just to identity forms but more importantly to disciplinary habits of thinking of human subjectivity as the default form of social agency. To elaborate this point, this essay surveys how some recent books, including Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People, Donna Haraway’s When Species Meet, Alice A. Kuzniar’s Melancholy’s Dog, and Jens Rydström’s Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweeden, 1889-1950, take as their subjects intimacies that belie hetero/homosexual along with non/human binaries. Grounding queer theory in a cross-species continuum is not the overall purpose of any of these texts, but an effect produced through the alignment of these authors’ very different examinations of sex relations as shared by social animals. Ranging from the bizarre (fish threesomes) to the raunchy (bestiality in the cowshed), and even more ordinary combinations of both (dogs’ dry-humping), the forms of sociality accruing in these discussions lay foundations for new biopolitical (as opposed to disciplinary) knowledges, prompting further inquiry into what happens to all of us when animals do it unlike they do on the Discovery Channel. --- ‘Despite the powerful allure of seeing other animals’ sex differences, let alone our own, as underwriting the role of the individual or legitimating identity alternatives, calling an animal gay is (as Raymond Williams said of calling literature ideological) “in practice little more than banging one inadequate category against another.”’ [[sources/McHugh, ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’, 2009|(McHugh 2009, 155)]] ^2c0326 ‘Revered as the goal of all sex acts, reproduction provides scientists with the conceptual means of avoiding these very questions about the social and other purposes of physical intimacies that do not so clearly result in progeny.’ [[sources/McHugh, ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’, 2009|(McHugh 2009, 154)]] ^3813df ‘Across the past decade, nonhuman nonheteronormativity has consolidated as a queer subject of inquiry in the context of growing concerns about how to account for agency beyond identity forms.’ [[sources/McHugh, ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’, 2009|(McHugh 2009,153–154)]] ^7fd9a3 ‘Homosexual and other “nonreproductive” animal sex behaviors have been documented for thousands of years, as long as people have been writing about members of other species, but their historically fragmentary treatment in laboratory and field studies has emerged as a scientific problem only recently.’ [[sources/McHugh, ‘Queer (And) Animal Theories’, 2009|(McHugh 2009, 154)]] ^88182f