Messing up Mating: Queer Feminist Engagements with Animal Behavior Science

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Acknowledgments

The arguments and analysis presented in this article represent the combined work of the members of the Elias Lab collaboration and undergraduate research apprentices: Enough acknowledgment cannot be given to Damian Elias, Erin Brandt, Malcolm Rosenthal, Benji Kessler, Ignacio Escalante, Maggie Raboin, Maeve Hanafin, and Chloë Koslo for their dedication to this collaboration. They made this article possible. I am deeply grateful to Ambika Kamath, Jen Rose Smith, Andrea Marston, Alex Werth, Erin Torkelson, John Elrick, Nancy Peluso, David Gilbert, Rosanna Carver, Abigail Martin, Laura Dev, Annah Zhu, Stephan Hochleitner, Juliet Lu, Jimena Diaz, Jenny Durant, Brian Klein, and Margiana Peterson-Rockney for their insightful feedback on this piece during its drafting; to special issue editors Daniel Rivers and Lauren Morrison for such attentive and thoughtful review.

Notes

¹ This article is limited by its inattention to the racializing and colonialist logics shaping, and shaped by, research on sexual selection and mate choice. There was not a strong enough examination of racialization in our focus groups to make it a central element of the article. See the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Mel Chen, Sylvia Wynter, and Kimberly TallBear on race, imperialism, and settler colonialism; the human/nonhuman binary; and animal studies.

² See the work of scholars at the conference Decolonizing Critical Animal Studies, as well as Haraway, Primate Visions; Haraway, When Species Meet; Hird, “Naturally Queer”; Hird, “Animal Transex”; Chen; Terry; Willey.

³ See dozens of scholars in the anthology Feminism and Evolutionary Biology: Boundaries, Intersections, and Frontiers, edited by Gowaty, as well as Bagehmil; Roughgarden; Subramaniam.

⁴ The primary material analyzed in this article does not do justice to this line of investigation and critique, but here I want to make very brief mention of the intersectional directions in which the Elias Lab collaboration must be pushed as we take seriously the unevenly distributed consequences of “naturalized” categories in popular culture and science. As black trans activist, author, and TV host Janet Mock explains, the historical hypersexualization of black women articulates with transmisogynist pathologization of trans women in particular as predatory liars. Mock’s critique of pop culture rhetoric that renders trans women as “prop, ploy, or sexual predator” might help to elucidate racialized consequences of biologizing gender and fragile masculinity. This article, and the Elias Lab focus groups, warrant more critical engagement with biology’s historical and ongoing constructions of racism and transphobia, and racialized and trans subjectivities, in particular.

⁵ URAP provides undergraduate students with close mentorship on in-depth research projects and awards course credit for the work of assisting faculty and graduate students in their work (urap.berkeley.edu). Currently, Hanafin, Koslo, and myself are coauthoring a paper based on our larger project on the biologization of sexual violence, spanning from popular science articles to juridico-legal and sociobiology discourse.

⁶ Later in this article I discuss researchers’ remarks on diversity in the field, and the relationship between scholars’ positionalities and spiders as a system of study (29–31).

⁷ Later in this article one member of the Elias Lab discusses how even Rosenthal terms cannot escaped gendered connotations—they offer a brief commentary on the masculine trope of the “courter” (p. 21).

⁸ See work by Sharf and Martin;; Matsuura et al., on same-sex sexual behavior and homosexual tandem running in insects and arachnids, with specific attention to termites.

⁹ M. Rosenthal is referring to both popular media and peer-reviewed studies of same-sex penguin pairing, in which two male penguins will couple and care for an egg. See “Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name” (Smith) and “Family Values in Black and White” (Zuk).

Additional information

Funding

I am deeply grateful to the Tanada Endowed Fellowship in Entomology and the UC Berkeley Social Science Matrix for their financial support.