The Queer Temporality of CandidaHomo Biotechnocultures

ABSTRACT

This article weaves together microsocial interactions, evolutionary theories of community and queer understandings of family, kinship and intimacy to grasp some of the complex microbiopolitics of the CandidaHomo ecology. I discuss contemporary scientific understandings of Candida albicans sociality as highly tactile and sensual, bodies constantly in touch with surfaces – chemicals, cells, tissues, prosthetics. I explore the highly contested field of evolutionary theories of social selection, including biogenetic kin selection and its biases about reproduction, intimacy and care. CandidaHomo ecologies are woven through queer kinship that is biological, but not genetic; embodied, but not essentialist. Queer communities, founded on choice and more-than-biological recognition, are considered as an alternative to dominant gene-centric kinship theories. These communities are intimate, performative and more-than-human, emerging from necessity and constantly co-created. However, homonormativity and biogenetic exclusion lurk in the closet of contemporary families of choice. I consider Luce Irigaray’s figuration of eros as a visceral and tactile reorientation of relatedness and care towards CandidaHomo kind, always already formed through impersonal intimacies and caresses. Finally, the artwork Surface Dynamics of Adhesion (2015) is discussed as a material-semiotic resolution and ‘technology’ for making kin, as Donna Haraway might say.

KEYWORDS:

• Candida albicans
• CandidaHomo
• kin selection
• microbiopolitics
• eros
• aesthetics
• queer kin

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the Traditional Owners of country throughout Australia and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures; and to elders both past, present and emerging. This research was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award and a UWA Safety Net Top Up Award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Tarsh Bates is an artist/researcher interested in the aesthetics of interspecies relationships and the human as a multispecies ecology. Tarsh is a postdoctoral research associate at SymbioticA, UWA, supported by The Seed Box, an international environmental humanities collaboration based at Linköping University in Sweden and funded by Mistra and Formas. She is particularly enamoured of Candida albicans.

ORCID

Tarsh Bates http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7930-0879

Notes

1. Here I refer to the definition of commensal as ‘one who eats at the same table’ and Donna Haraway’s (2003) mess mates ‘eating well together.’

2. Response-ability is described by Astrid Schrader (2010) as an obligation to create apparatuses, situations or conditions that enable response. Further, it is an obligation to attend to my own responsibilities towards or in relation to the responder.

3. A moiety is both a functional part of a chemical molecule and kinship groups into which a society is organised (Australians Together 2017; IUPAC 1997).

4. Mutualists are individuals of different species that both exhibit improved fitness through association, whereas commensals are individuals that benefit from an individual of another species without affecting the fitness of that individual (Shirtliff, Peters, and Jabra-Rizk 2009).

5. Symbiogenesis describes speciation that occurs from symbiotic associations. It arose from the understanding that the eukaryotic cell likely evolved through endosymbiosis, i.e. the engulfment of one prokaryotic cell by another, which led to a fitness benefit for both (Margulis 1970).

6. Reciprocity describes the production of goods or services by both individuals that provide mutual benefits. Altruism describes behaviours by an individual that result in other individuals receiving fitness benefits (West et al. 2006).

7. Among many others.

8. This term refers specifically to an Australian government policy of forced removal of indigenous children from their families during the twentieth century, and more broadly to government sanctioned eugenics programs during the nineteenth (Read 2006). This policy continues, framed as ‘child protection.’

9. Of course, this depends on the types of kinship claims made.

10. Neither Davis nor I argue here for a biopolitical human population control. Similarly, we both recognise the inequity of consumption.

11. I am monolingual and have therefore relied on translations of Irigaray’s French texts.

12. A dado rail is a decorative frame that separates protective panelling on the lower part of the wall (the dado or wainscot) from the upper part of a wall, which was often covered with expensive wallpaper or artwork.

13. Thanks to the reviewer for drawing this association to my attention.

14. Which is a disturbing and all too common example of enviro-cultural imperialism.

15. This assumption that queers do not have children is of course not true but is a prominent figuration in both queer and evolutionary discourses.

16. Thanks to Mike Bianco for the provocation that initiated this rationale.