Trans/Plants within Conservation: Transplantimalities and Multispecies Entanglements in the Galapagos Islands

• In Event: Decolonial Queer and Trans Ecologies Part 2 (HYBRID)

Abstract

The Galapagos Islands are often imagined as a pristine, “untouched” natural laboratory, thanks in large part to Charles Darwin’s landmark visit to the islands in 1835. Yet, both before and after Darwin’s stay, the islands have served as a hub in global processes of colonialism and economic development. In 1879, the settlement of Hacienda El Progreso was established on the Galapagos Island of San Cristobal and was quickly transformed into a thriving sugar plantation and nexus within the global economy. As was the case in many tropical areas, sugar cane cultivation relied on livestock labor and guinea grass was introduced to the islands alongside these animals as pasturage (Stahl et al., 2020). Today, the islands are seen as an international “natural” treasure, and guinea grass is categorized as one of the most pervasive "invasive" plant species.

Engaging transgender studies and critical plant studies in conversation, this paper considers how plants like guinea grass might be the paradigmatic subjects of modern biopower (Nealon, 2015), asking “how and where it came from, how it is being used to establish certain kinds of naturalization and normativity, and how it might open up other kinds of relationships” (Cielemęcka & Szczygielska, 2019, p. 14). Tracing the histories of guinea grass in the Galapagos alongside conservation discourses, I suggest that this grass operates as what Mel Chen calls “transplantimalities” (Hayward, 2015). Chen introduced the concept of “transplantimalities” in reference to trans-species organ transplants, as a possible articulation of “species, gender, human, and transness in ways that allow environmental studies, animal studies, and transgender studies to account more deeply for their sometimes implicitly mutually enacted politics” (Hayward, 2015, p. 321). In this project, I expand upon Chen’s introduction of transplantimalities beyond organ transplants, to employ it as an analytic within crip and trans ecologies for “thinking about how transitions, transformations, and other kinds of trans becomings are shaped by species… [and] how trans [and disability are] species technolo[ies] and [are] always involved with nonhumans” (Hayward, 2015).

In this project, I take up the notion of trans as relational and as a challenge to categorization that is foundational to taxonomic systems. Guinea grass read as transplantimalities builds upon trans (within trans ecologies and transnational studies) as the "capillary space of connection and circulation between the macro and micropolitical registers through which the lives of bodies become enmeshed in the lives of nations, states, and capital formations" (Stryker et al., 2008, p. 14). Within trans ecologies, "classification is evaded for something more ‘transformative,’ something ‘that starts in one place and ends in another’” (Hayward, 2008, p. 68). This project considers how this transplanted plant functions through its relationships to animals and entanglement in micro and macro processes of colonial, economic, and environmental transformation - are that disruptive and transformative capillary space. Guinea grass as transplantimalities offers new insight into not only how we might understand plants, but also unsettles understandings of native/invasive; natural/unnatural; normal/abnormal within environmental politics, with implications for crip ecologies and trans/crip multispecies world-making.

Author

• Jenne Schmidt, Colorado State University