BOTANY, SEXUALITY, (UN)COMMONALITY - Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
Panel proposed at the 2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
What are the possibilities—and limitations—of investigating commonalities between the plant and the human for discovering new forms of trans, nonbinary, and genderfluid sexualities? How might the study of vegetal forms of agency trouble the very notion of sexual subjectivity as something that originates inside an individual, rather than its environment? Given the role of botany as both a sexual and colonial science, how do postcolonial authors create new rhetorical relations to plant life to express not only queer sexual identities, but the specificities of postcolonial identity more broadly?