Queering Physarum polycephalum

• In Event: The Edible, the Moldy, and the Weedy: Speculative and Materialist Interventions into (Evading) Capitalist Capture

Abstract

The ostensibly surprising intelligence of Physarum polycephalum has made popular science news headlines over the past several years, as it gets taken up by urban planners and computer scientists who not only marvel at the combination of its penchant for efficiency and adaptability but also use the slime mold to model network arrays. Octavia E. Butler, whose life’s work involved using the generic medium of science fiction to imagine worlds otherwise, looked to slime mold’s queerer behaviors as inspiration for formulating non-hierarchical socialities and even more radical onto-epistemological modes of living in common. In this presentation, I mean to interject Butler’s thinking beyond the human into the flurry of critical interest in Sylvia Wynter’s critiques of “the human” as an Enlightenment category that fueled its fanciful liberation with the relegation of many to the inhuman. Drawing on queer-feminist materialisms, I inquire after how slime molds and other colony organisms push back against androcentric notions of individualism and competition that feed all-too-conveniently into capitalist capture. The plasmodial improprieties of the amoebic myxomycetes Butler queried constitute a radical challenge to more entrenched narratives of how organisms organize themselves. Through a combination of close reading of Butler’s notes and fiction and a broader engagement with histories and philosophies of science, I argue that her speculations provide a rich, alternative archive for feminist-queer science studies to examine as it focalizes collaborative and collectivist frameworks for conducting science queerly.

Author

• Aimee Bahng, Pomona College