'Planting Queer Intimacies' set for March 5 at noon as part of the Queering Research Series

Join LGBTQ+ Western and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for the final Winter quarter event in the Queering Research Series. Catriona Sandilands (Professor of Environmental Studies, York University) will speaking about Planting Queer Intimacies on Thursday, March 5 at 12:00 p.m. in the Multicultural Center room 735.
 
This presentation will examine interspecies intimacy with mulberries in order to consider the historical and ongoing biocolonial linkages between the regulation of mulberry intimacies (with other mulberries, with silkworms, with people) and the regulation of human intimacies (e.g., compulsory heterosexuality, destruction of Indigenous family forms, and the institution of “population”). Mulberries are not a metaphor: they are plants that invite and thrive on multispecies intimacies that are sometimes congruent with forms of biocolonialism (e.g., the silk trade), and sometimes disruptive of it (e.g., Eurowestern understandings of stable species identities within enumerable biodiversity). As such, mulberries are particularly good “kin” to think with:  they invite a specific, concrete, feminist analysis of the idea of kinship with plants; they demand attention to the central role of intimacies, including multispecies intimacies, in the ongoing unfolding of biocolonialism; and they invite, with their especially juicy, queer and trans embodiments, understandings of vegetal intimacy that support precious relations of both intra- and inter-species care.
 
More about the Queering Research Series at https://lgbtq.wwu.edu/qrseries/.