QUEER DUCKS (AND OTHER ANIMALS)

An entertaining, informative tour through the sexual diversity of animal life.

From bonobos to fruit flies, wrasse fish to bottlenose dolphins, Schrefer, who is part of New York University’s animal studies master’s program, explores nonhuman animals’ lives in the contexts of sex and gender. Do nonhuman animals have sex purely for pleasure? Are they ever polyamorous? Are there trans animals? Intersex ones? Intercut with delightful comics, memoirlike vignettes, queer theory, and interviews with experts including a primatologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and wildlife ecologist (to name a few), Schrefer takes seriously the desires and pleasures of animals’ lives, revealing how gender and sexuality are experienced as social and not just biological constructs. The book is motivated by compassion, as Schrefer explains: “I think care for animals leads to greater care for humans, too, since we all share the natural world, and the same systems of power that endanger animals also endanger humans.” This regard extends to young people, as Schrefer writes a love letter to his 11-year-old self, who needed to know that queer people are indeed a part of nature. While the book uses a human identity-based framework to understand animals whose consciousnesses we can’t possibly understand, it will help queer kids feel less alone as it highlights the filtered lens through which the animal kingdom has for too long been presented.

A thoughtful, thought-provoking, and incredibly fun study of queerness across the animal kingdom.