Following a long line of queer and feminist thinkers who have taken up intimacy as a key terrain of biopolitical struggle, this talk will explore possibilities for living intimately with plants, and especially so-called “invasive” plants, as an important invitation to rethinking ecological relationships in and for the [M]Anthropocene.

The talk will focus on mulberries in Southern Ontario – both Morus alba and M. rubra – as a way of considering the historical and ongoing biocolonial linkages between the regulation of mulberry intimacies and the regulation of human intimacies. Mulberries are particularly good plants with whom to think to imagine revived multispecies intimacies and kinships for these biopolitically complicated times.

Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University, where she teaches in the Environmental Humanities. Her most recent book (edited) is Rising Tides: Reflections for Climate-Changing Times (Caitlin, 2019); her in-progress book
is Plantasmagoria: Botanical Encounters in the [M]Anthropocene, and she is still fielding questions about Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Indiana, 2010).

Tue, 12th November, 4:00-6:00 PM, Brock University
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Posthumanism Research Institute