Disorientation as Liberation: A Queer Phenomenology of the Werewolf Figures in Carter’s “The Werewolf” and Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story”

The werewolf figure has traditionally been associated with aberration, bestiality, and the primal nature that is believed to lurk within all human beings. However, due to the liminal space the werewolf occupies as a hybrid of human and animal, embodying both masculine and feminine traits, it serves as a useful conceptual tool to question clear-cut distinctions between these hierarchical binaries. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s concept of “queer phenomenology,” this study approaches the werewolf figure in Angela Carter’s “The Werewolf” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Wife’s Story” as an embodiment of queerness. Carter’s regendered werewolf and Le Guin’s were-human, who transforms from wolf into human rather than the reverse, disrupt normative expectations of werewolf narratives as they assume alternative identities that transcend the hierarchical binaries of masculine/feminine and human/animal. This study argues that through such disorientation, Carter’s and Le Guin’s unconventional werewolves emerge as queer figures and thus offer liberating alternatives to the restrictive models of identity, gender and species imposed by patriarchal and anthropocentric discourses.