Queer Austringers. Helen Macdonald Reads T. H. White

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