Sex Told and (Re)told: Queering Sexed Bodies

• In Event: Bad Queers, Bold Crips, and Black Femmes - II: Sexual and Gender Deviance in and Beyond Biomedicine

Abstract

This paper traces the extant language of "sex" and sexuality in plant reproductive biology to reveal its very queer history. How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? I 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 race(d) heterosexual romance.. Drawing on key examples, the presentation aims to queer plant sexuality - (un)read plant sex, sexual anatomy and bodies – and in so doing to imagine new possibilities of plant sex, and sexualities, and their relationalities.
STS has long worked to situate science and scientific knowledge within their historical, cultural and political context. In re(reading) biology through a queer STS lens, the paper draws on alternate genealogies for plant reproductive biology.

Author

• Banu Subramaniam, University of Massachusetts Amherst