The problem is a willful refusal to appreciate the asexuality of some beings and the sociality of sexy interspecies entanglements as a way to radically open up questions of what sex is and can be. Rather than always desexualize plants or eschew sexual metaphors, we can embrace the promiscuous, playful perversity of plants to multiply, obfuscate, and challenge the blurred boundaries between human and nonhuman, animal and vegetal, sexual and asexual. We could also challenge landscapes of pleasure and sex altogether as prerequisites for a biological life. Plants offer many queer possibilities. We can embrace them all!

I am here for embracing plants as queer icons! No wonder I love plants so much.

This chapter demonstrates the issues with shoving things into an anthropocentric box. Just as looking at plants through a "survival of the fittest" lens hampered our ability to see the mutual relationships some species enjoy, shoving plants into a "penis and vagina sex just like humans" box ignores all the cool reproductive strategies they have, not just in how they combine their gametes (or don't) but also how they spread their fertilized seeds. It's so much more than "ha ha that part looks like a penis so this is the boy plant." (But also, some of them really do look a lot like a penis and it is pretty funny)

"Evolutionary biology and Darwinism have remained grounded in cis-heterosexual reproduction as the critical fulcrum of natural selection. But is heterosex everything? Is there room for other possibilities? Can we narrate other stories beyond the suffocating tales of a rationalizing and naturalizing patriarchal culture grounded in male sexual violence?"

This was a really good chapter, although a bit repetitive. We expand on previous statements regarding the sexualization of plants and reflect on its lingering ramifications while calling for queering up our understanding of botany, which may in turn help us better understand ourselves.

What stands out to me is the still observable fixation unwell men have on purity and "God's design."

"'... as Schiebinger argues, “Linnaeus saw plants as having sex, in the fullest sense of the term.' He borrowed terms for romance, eroticism, and the sanctity of love, nuptials, and marriage into his vocabulary for plants. Plant sexuality took place almost exclusively within the bonds of marriage. Through Linnaeus’s imaginative classification system, lowly plants were transformed into humans, and their sexual morphology and behavior came to resemble human sociology and sexuality."

And of course, we get some sass. After walking through a lengthy list of terms created to distinguish the plethora of plants that do not follow a binary concept of sex,

"I think you get the picture! The proliferation of terms serves to accommodate a world of abundant and imaginative plant variation into the limited vocabulary of European sex lives." 😅😅

Let's go!!

"Like most other fields in biology, plant reproductive biology is suffused with “just so” stories—stories about plants, plant parts, and plant sex that inevitably rationalize and naturalize overdetermined racialized cis-heterosexual scripts. Here I attempt a queer reading of botany’s account of plant reproductive biology. I tell the story by denaturalizing the scripts and making us see them in a new light. In three acts, I read, unread, and reread plant reproductive biology to ask how we might dismantle regimes of racialized cis-hetero patriarchy.

... Plants urge us into new conversations to reimagine what we mean by sex and sexuality."