Re-imagining Reproduction: The Queer Possibilities of Plants

Abstract

How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? How did plant biology come to theorize plant sexuality with binary formulations of male/female, sex/gender, sperm/egg, active male and passive females—all of which resemble western categories of sex, gender, and sexuality? Tracing extant language of sex and sexuality in plant reproductive biology, we examine the histories of science to explore how plant reproductive biology emerged historically from formations of colonial racial and sexual politics, and how evolutionary biology was premised on the imaginations of racialized heterosexual romance. Drawing on key examples, the paper aims to (un)read plant sexuality, and sexual anatomy and bodies to imagine new possibilities of plant sex, sexualities, and their relationalities. In short, plant sex and sexuality are not two different objects of inquiry but intimately related—it is their inter-relation that is the focus of this essay. One of the key impulses from the humanities that we bring to this essay is a careful consideration of how terms and terminologies are related to each other historically and culturally. In anthropomorphizing plants, if plant sexuality was modelled on human sexual formations, might a re-imagination of plant sexuality open new vistas for the biological sciences? While our definitions of plant sex will always be informed by contemporary society and culture, interrogating the histories of our theories and terminologies can help us reimagine a biology that allows for new and more accurate understandings of plants, plant biology, and the evolution of reproduction.

When the window is a mirror: how do dominant theories limit our understanding of nature? (ESA 2023 INS23)

“…For example, the assumption that same‐sex sexual behavior in animals incurs a fitness cost and should therefore be rare (discussed by Monk) may stem from Western, Victorian‐era values of sexuality. Similarly, early modern sexual values have “haunted” plant biology since Linnaeus (Subramaniam and Bartlett 2023). Even in the current day, narratives of Asian plants' invasion in the United States mirror anti‐Asian xenophobia, even when such characterizations belie ecological reality (Cardozo and Subramaniam 2013).…”