Ways of Queerness: Two Cursory Readings of Robin Myers’s “Hunting and Gathering”

This paper advances two readings of the poem “Hunting and Gathering” by Robin Myers: one argues that the text is queer and the other claims that what is queer is a specific interpretation of it. In the first section, I propose that the piece’s formal characteristics—quantity rhythm, sound repetition, and proportion—engage the concept of ‘queerness’ broadly understood as a critique of and a deviation from ingrained normative standards. I also assert that the piece’s thematic features—motifs, narrative devices, and tropologies—concern the acceptation of ‘queerness’ in its close-knit relationship with gender and sexuality. The second section shows that a literal reading of Myers’s text is queer insofar as it transgresses the law/s of genre/s. I depart from Jacques Derrida’s ambiguous use of the French term to propose that interpreting the text literally involves a non-linear consideration of poetic genres and a critique of the anthropo-logic of gender.