Ecologies of Gender

Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn

Susanne Lettow, Sabine Nessel, Susanne Lettow, Sabine Nessel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000544442
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Biological Sciences

Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn examines the role of gender in recent debates about the nonhuman turn in the humanities, and critically explores the implications for a contemporary theory of gender and nature relations.

The interdisciplinary contributions in this volume each provides theoretical reflections based on an analysis of specific naturecultural processes. They reveal how "ecologies of gender" are constructed through aesthetic, epistemological, political, technological and economic practices that shape multispecies and material interrelations as well as spatial and temporal orderings. The volume includes contributions from cultural anthropology, cultural studies, film studies, literary studies, media studies, philosophy and theatre studies. The essays are organized around four key dimensions of an "ecological" understanding of gender: "creatures", "materials", "spaces" and "temporalities".

The overall aim of the volume Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn is to explore the potentialities and limitations of the nonhuman turn for a critical analysis and theory of ecologies of gender, and thereby make an original contribution to both the environmental humanities and gender studies.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students from the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities and environmental studies more broadly, as well as from gender studies and cultural theory.

Part 1 Creatures The Biopolitics of Making Kin

1 Mulberry Intimacies and the Sweetness of Kinship

Catriona Sandilands

DOI: 10.4324/9781003023319-3

Introduction: Mulberries, A Love Story

Until 2017, I never gave mulberries much thought. This situation is unusual, as I have been living intimately, thinking and writing with plants for a long time. If asked, I would have been able to hum the tune of “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush,” but I had never knowingly tasted a mulberry fruit and certainly would not have said we were on close terms. Although a mulberry tree of some size inhabits the street-facing part of my front yard, I also had no real idea that I cohabited my West Toronto neighbourhood with rather a lot of its relatives. From a starting position of relative mulberry-blindness, that year I learned to pay attention to mulberry trees in two ways, more-or-less at the same time. In the first, I re-read Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex (2002) for a panel at the 2017 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment conference in Detroit, Michigan. I was looking for the plants in Middlesex, which is mostly set in Detroit, and there are mulberries all over it (both the novel and the city). In Middlesex, they are a major dramatic motif and their presence tendrils through the novel’s stories of sex, gender, class, migration, racism and incest (to name a few, see Sandilands 2018). In the second, I took a field-naturalist course in Toronto’s High Park: there are mulberries all over it, too. As the course leader outlined, these trees are also part of a drama, in which one kind of mulberry (Morus alba, or white mulberry) is considered an exotic-invasive, threatening the integrity of another kind of mulberry (M. rubra, or red mulberry) to the point the latter is listed as endangered under the Ontario Endangered Species Act. In High Park, we spent a lot of time learning how to distinguish the two species (fuzziness of leaves is the major indicator: you have to get pretty up-close and intimate with a mulberry to identify it), and it seemed that almost all the ones we examined were hybrids.

Especially with all this drama going on, I started to pay a lot more attention to mulberries. In fact, I fell completely in love with them. I learned to recognize their coyly variable leaf-shapes (heterophylly) and suddenly saw them everywhere: intensely pruned small, weeping varieties presiding over neat circular beds in highly manicured lawns; beautiful large trees shading the streets of older neighbourhoods, often announcing their presence with extensive purple stains on the sidewalk; scraggly shrubs thriving at the edges of parks and, especially in Detroit, growing in glorious, entrepreneurial profusion in (now) vacant lots. I sought out their berries on local trees, where there were many, and in local shops, where there were none except dried ones. I sought them out in literary worlds beyond Middlesex, where they take many forms. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses ([8] 2016) the ill-starred lovers Pyramus and Thisbe arrange to meet under a mulberry tree, and Thisbe’s dying act is to curse its white fruit to turn the red of their blood. In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ([1595] 1895) they reappear via Quince’s prologue in the play-within-a-play Pyramus and Thisbe; they also make their way into Coriolanus, where they are “humble” because delicate to handle. The image/idiom of “blue sea turned into mulberry fields” recurs in Chinese literature (e.g. in Ge Hong’s third century CE Shenxian Zhuan, see Campany 2002) as an indication of epochal change; 1500 years later, Walt Whitman ([1855] 1904), also writing about change, includes a mulberry tree in his poem “This Compost” (in Leaves of Grass), which is a meditation on the nature of life and soul as an endless recycling of everyday matters and energies, including mulberry ones. And, in Hisham Matar’s Booker-nominated In the Country of Men (2006) there is this gorgeous fragment from protagonist Suleiman, remembering his nine-year-old self in Tripoli:

I decided that mulberries were the best fruit God had created and I began to imagine young, lively angels conspiring to plant a crop in the earth’s soil after they heard that Adam, peace and blessings be upon him, and Eve, peace and blessings be upon her, were being sent down here to Earth as punishment. God knew, of course, He’s the Allknowing, but he liked the idea and so let the angels carry out their plan. I plucked one off and it almost melted in my fingers. I threw it in my mouth and it dissolved, the small balls exploding like fireworks. I ate another, and another.

(Matar 2006, 47)

Another, and another, and another. As I grew and savoured my intimacy with mulberries both local and literary – bloody, humble, sensuous, representative of life, change and love – it became increasingly clear to me that mulberry relationships are often very intimate. They are intimate in their bursting, luscious sweetness (Matar); in their association with blood (Ovid, Shakespeare); and in their multiple and ongoing involvements in economies of domestication (Ge Hong, Whitman, Eugenides, street and yard trees). Most obviously, of course, mulberries are intimately involved in the millennia-old industry of sericulture, in which they are the primary food source of the silkworm, Bombyx mori. Especially in sericulture, we see that these intimacies are not always sites of pleasure. For the domesticated silkworm, intimacy with mulberries and silk-harvesting humans not only leads to untimely death (the cocoons are generally boiled alive to clean and extract the finest silk thread) but has also, through thousands of years of selective breeding, rendered the adult moth incapable of flight and, perversely, insensitive to the Morus smell of the leaves on which it must lay its eggs (Coles 2019, 660).¹ For the white mulberry, however – the worm’s favourite food – this intimacy has been largely responsible for the species’ global distribution, from its origins in China to its now-ubiquity on all continents except Antarctica. As Peter Coles documents in his sumptuous plant biography Mulberry (2019), the globalization of sericulture and moriculture has been extensively bound up in imperialism, war, religious conflict and colonialism; both cultures have also supported artisanal as well as industrial forms of cultivation and production, and have extensively involved women’s and children’s labour both historically and in the present, including everything from empowering female entrepreneurship to institutionalizing child slavery.

It is now not uncommon to speak of “plant/human intimacies” as sites of multispecies enquiry. Julie Soleil Archambault’s (2016) ethnography of gardeners in Inhambane, Mozambique, for example, suggests that such intimacies can embody the “transformative potential of everyday engagement with the material world” in opposition to neoliberal capital abstractions and the related “commodification of intimacy” (246, 247). I have – especially given the ways my moriphilic and other plant intimacies have shaped and enriched my inhabitation of Toronto – a great deal of sympathy for this argument. As Lauren Berlant, Kim TallBear and other feminist thinkers have emphasized in different ways, however, intimacies are also sites of regulation: who is allowed to be, forced to be and/or prohibited from being intimate with whom – and how – is a significant modality of biopolitical organization in settler-capitalist societies, and these operations of biopower clearly include plant and other multispecies actors. To practise restorative “kinship” with plants and others – as Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013), Deborah Bird Rose (2010), and Donna Haraway (2016) all suggest we do, urgently – thus must involve not only an embrace of plant-loving in general, but also a thoughtful questioning of the different kinds of intimacies in which we are already bound up with plants, and a careful exploration of other, perhaps more just and life-enriching intimate possibilities that may emerge in the process of enquiry. In this chapter, I will attempt some of this work of thoughtful questioning by focussing on mulberries, and specifically on the biopolitics of mulberry–human relations in Southern Ontario and on possibilities for their ethically sensuous reorientation in current conditions of intimate complexity. Specifically, I will tell two mulberry stories. In the first, I will consider the biopolitical organization of mulberry species identity, which is the central axis of the “invasion” drama involving M. alba and M. rubra. In this story, the reduction of plants to their genomic identities is part of the larger policing of “purity” that is central to the racist logic of settler colonization, that privileges the idea of a stable (and human-less) nature to be defended from change, and that prevents us from considering possibilities for M. alba intimacies outside their involvements in colonialism and invasiveness. In the second, I will consider the everyday and systemic regulation of mulberry sexual expression, which is linked to questions of utility; to a colonial distrust of fecundity, ferality, unpredictability and excess; and to the spatial and aesthetic impoverishment of multispecies intimacies and communities in cities like Toronto. Thinking about the biopolitical organization – and reorientation – of moricentric intimacies in these ways is a way of taking up possibilities for life and kinship in a manner that recognizes responsibility for the violences wrought by some institutions of intimacy, and that simultaneously creates space for ethical kin- and world-makings despite the uncomfortably intimate conditions in which we currently find ourselves.

Mulberry Intimacies I: Identity

Red mulberry is native to North America, where it is found throughout the central and eastern parts of the continent, especially in the southeast. Like all mulberries, M. rubra is a deciduous, fruit-bearing tree that grows quickly while young; it can reach a height of 65 feet and often lives 125 years (so: medium sized and not very old in tree terms).² Given its widespread distribution, sometimes dense population and prolific fruit production, it is not surprising that M. rubra – also sachiissegóna òchia (Onondaga), oakhattim inschi (Delaware), mtekwa˙palwa (Shawnee), bihi (Choctaw), ké (Mvskoke/Creek) and kuwa (Cherokee), among other names – plays a major role in the culinary, medicinal and technological worlds of many Indigenous nations on the eastern side of the continent.³ Indeed, in the southeast several nations celebrate a whole “mulberry month” – for example, bihi hvshi (Choctaw) and Kē-Hvse (Mvskoke), both roughly in May – out of respect and gratitude for their abundance. The fruit – carefully cultivated by some nations for millennia (see Taylor 2019; Treat 2011) – can be eaten fresh, dried, made into jam or jelly, and mashed into a variety of forms of cake and then reconstituted and cooked into a highly nutritious sauce for late winter days, high in Vitamin C, iron, K1, potassium and antioxidants. Small branches of red mulberry trees are pliable and can be made into bows and baskets; older wood is light, sturdy and good for construction; inner bark can be used to make cloth, without the intermediary of silkworms; and many parts of the tree create excellent dyes with colours depending on whether the roots, branches, bark or berries are used (Taylor 2019; Treat 2011, 2018). Different parts of the tree also contain bioactive compounds, and many nations have ongoing traditions of mulberry medicinal use as a laxative, emetic, cathartic, tonic, anthelmintic and/or hallucinogenic, and as a treatment for urinary problems, dysentery and ringworm.⁴ M. rubra is at the far northern reach of its habitat in the Carolinian forests of Southern Ontario, which stretch southeast from what is now Toronto to Lake Erie (and beyond, southward). In Ojibwemowin, mulberries are mitigwaabimin; in Mohawk, they are shahieskó:wa. In both nations, mulberries recede in importance relative to other berries such as strawberries, blueberries and bearberries, which are far more prevalent in these more northern territories; they are, however, important enough to have names.

White mulberry is, of course, a relative newcomer to North America, but it has been a globally cosmopolitan species for far longer. As Coles documents extensively, M. alba is originally from East Asia, where it has been “the stuff of legend” (2019, 62) for thousands of years, and was carried along the so-called Silk Road, slightly behind the moths, from China to Japan, India, the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa – where it met communities of black mulberry (M. nigra) – and beyond. Although less prized than that of M. nigra, the fruit of M. alba can be easily moved, dried and stored; perhaps more importantly, its leaves are the preferred food source of silkworms, even relative to other mulberry species, and so the trees have followed sericultural desires in their anthropogenic world travels rather than culinary, nutritional, medical or aesthetic ones. Such silk industrial aspirations brought M. alba to North America. Although European explorer/colonizers noted extensive, often carefully cultivated M. rubra groves in what are now South Carolina and Georgia in the sixteenth century, white mulberries were brought to the American colonies at about the same time with the specific intent of promoting a domestic silk industry. For example, in 1624 the legislature of Virginia required every (white, property-owning) male resident to plant at least four white mulberry trees for precisely this purpose (USDA Forest Service), and Benjamin Franklin, in the later eighteenth century, was instrumental in the planting of M. alba in cities like Philadelphia in order to make individual smallholdings more economically se...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Ecologies of Gender and the Nonhuman Turn
• Part 1 Creatures: The Biopolitics of Making Kin
• Part 2 Materials: Agency in/of Transcorporeal Assemblages
• Part 3 Spaces: Landscapes and Architectures of Power and Imagination
• Part 4 Temporalities: Histories, Presents and Futures to Change
• Index