Valeurs du bestiaire queer : entre vitalisme, biologisme et naturalisme

Research into human sexualities—especially those considered marginal or alternative—often turns to what might be called a “queer bestiary.” The quintessential example of this strategy remains André Gide’s Corydon (1924), an important yet deliberately ambiguous text. The aim of such an approach is straightforward: by highlighting examples of behaviors deemed “monstrous” in humans but observable in the natural world, it seeks to show that “Nature” dictates nothing. What is labeled “unnatural” in human society, the argument goes, is in fact only contrary to custom or habit. Queer sexualities are thus reframed—not as impossible aberrations, but as rare, legitimate variations within broader natural processes. While the invocation of the queer bestiary has long served as a strategy of “normalization,” our intention is to place this approach in dialogue with several contemporary trends: vitalism, understood as a general effort to affirm continuity between human beings and life more broadly; biologism, the temptation to reduce human phenomena to biological explanations; and naturalism, the search for moral or normative guidance in nature itself. Against or alongside these currents, we advocate for an alternaturalist use of the bestiary—one that approaches nature with a skeptical eye, not to affirm any fixed truths, but to suspend judgment and expand our definitions of what counts as “natural.”