QUEER LOVE, GENDER BENDING BACTERIA; Eben Kirksey (2018)
Wolbachia often perform queer tricks inside their invertebrate hosts. In some host species these bacteria induce parthenogenesis – completely eliminating males from the population. Wolbachiacan also transform genetic males into reproductively viable females.(..)
Rather than fitting the script of monogamous love, where one kind of invertebrate becomes the center of a bacteria’s world, the ecological arenas inhabited by Wolbachia have become sites of ongoing polyamorous liaisons (..)
Love in the Wolbachiacene involves temporary alliances and symbiotic attachments – connections that are established like a rhizome between different kingdoms, classes, and families (..)Queer kinship, for Wolbachia involves becoming-molecular – in swarms of multiplicities, as elements of the self cross over into the other.
Wolbachia create kin as they trade genes with other species – blurring the boundaries between the other and the self. (..)
In biological circles, inverts (slang for ‘invertebrates’) are animals without back-bones, while queer theorists explore the playful work of people who transpose gender roles and interrupt heteronormativity – sharing the activity of making bodies pliable, mobile, and transposable (..) In the current era of extinction, we urgently need to refine our cyborg politics: taking ‘pleasure in the confusion of boundaries ’and making arguments ‘for responsibility in their construction’(..) In maintaining refuges, spaces for wild and unruly forms of life, we need to make sure that homes for inverts and queer microbes are included too.that disrupt anthropocentric concerns.”
Eben Kirksey is also a curator for the very parasitic ‘Multispecies Salon.
https://www.multispecies-salon.org/kirksey/
Original Source
https://www.academia.edu/…/Article_Queer_Love_Gender_Bendin…
See also
Donna Haraway Interview from Multispecies Salon on Vimeo.
#synchronicityofparasites
