This Is How You Become the Animal You Are So Bent on Becoming

Taking Andil Gosine’s invitation in Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021) to consider the possibilities of animality, this essay sits with the two valences that are potentially inherent in his framing—first, that we reassess the generative possibilities of animality, and second, that we consider how in refusing the demarcating line between humanity and animality they potentially remake each other. Centering “animality” as an analytic, the author considers the kinds of relations that animality allows us to imagine with ourselves and each other. The essay frames Gosine’s questions as ones that pursue the decolonial possibilities of animality and suggests that Nature’s Wild offers us a blueprint for a Caribbean queer decolonial politic. Its primary inquiry resides in asking how animality adapts and signifies in potentially intersectional ways and whether this framing makes room for us to envision the ways “gender” also holds generative possibilities in relation to ideas of animality.