Beasts of the Southern Wild

Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin's film adaptation of Lucy Alibar's play, Juicy and Delicious, is set amid an isolated, Louisiana bayou community, referred to as "the Bathtub" by its residents. The film, which charts the coming of age of Hushpuppy, a 6-year-old, black, tomboy protagonist who lives in this community with her father, Wink, opens to the ominous sounds of rain and thunder. Nevertheless, Beasts demonstrates that sentimentalism continues to play an important role in the cultural work of the queer, tomboy child. Beasts demonstrates that even as the tomboy tradition evolved to incorporate queer children of color and critique social hierarchies, it also continued to deploy many racialist and racist tropes and conventions. Beasts has been criticized for its emphasis on Darwinian struggle, but Hushpuppy is also prompted to challenge a survival-of-the-fittest mentality. Beasts illustrates that the tomboy tradition often continues to consider childhood, queerness, and racial and economic oppression through a decidedly sentimental lens.