Please join us Monday April 10 for a workshop featuring Banu Subramaniam, co-sponsored by GSWS. We'll be meeting in Cohen 402 to accommodate a larger group than usual! Time remains the same—3:30—and as usual you can also tune in via Zoom. We'll have a reception in the lounge after the talk.

Abstract: How did plant sexuality come to so hauntingly resemble human sexual formations? Tracing extant language of "sex" and sexuality in plant reproductive biology, 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 (un)read plant sexuality, and sexual anatomy and bodies to imagine new possibilities of plant sex, and sexualities, and their relationalities. If plant sexuality was modelled on human sexual formations, might a re-imagination of plant sexuality open up new vistas for the human?