https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5573-2212
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ABSTRACT
This article explores the death/life ecologies that flourish along the queered axes of spider reproductive behaviours – from cannibalistic sex to matricidal birth – and how the language and concepts used to describe these behaviours both reflect and distort heteronormative human accounts of gender/sex, life/death and thresholds between. It recalibrates storied accounts of spider sex, life and death through a critical, creative posthumanist approach to nonhuman life as zoē (Braidotti). It presents a queered reading of spider ethologies in which death is not life’s programmatic terminus, but another zoētic expression of desire: the endless reaching for affirmative becomings through (re)productive comminglings of bodies – whether by penetration, modulation, ingestion, or absorption. It argues how a spiderly weaving together of sex and death effects the conditions for the creative survival (inherence) of life itself. This zoētic analysis of spider ethologies proposes a novel figuration: the arachnomad – a sensuous assemblage of spider, web, affects and tangents – as a material model and heuristic for understanding nomadic subjectivities, and for queering the life/death relation.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to artist Tomás Saraceno: for the opportunity to become proximal to a multitude of spider/webs, and whose Arachnophilia project and energetic questions inspire multiple threads of webbed thought. Thanks also to the organisers of the inaugural Queer Death Studies conference at Karlstad in 2019, at which a formative version of this article was tested.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Such stories are already emerging in and through posthuman and feminist STS scholarship that has substantially challenged the notion of life as something contained within a discrete and singular organism, where ‘neither biology nor philosophy any longer support the notion of independent organisms in environments’ (Haraway Citation2016, 39). We can also point to developmental biologist Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber (Citation2012) symbiotic argument (after Lynn Margulis) that ‘we have never been individuals’—echoed by philosopher Erin Manning’s (Citation2013) claim to be ‘always more than one’, tracing a philosophy of life and subjectivity which argues for ontogenetic becomings-other, rather than unitary or essentialised categories of being.
2 Here, Diane Chisholm describes the queer biophilic practice and writings of Ellen Meloy, which I found particularly illuminating: an ‘exploration of bio-erotic-diversity’ which maps ‘flows of desire that escape classical biology and even exceed the “biological exuberance” with which nonhuman animals embrace sexuality’ (Citation2010, 359).
3 —noting here that Braidotti’s (Citation2013, 164) critical cartographic method also demands this ‘epistemic and ethical accountability’.
4 For information about Saraceno’s Arachnophilia project and community, see: www.arachnophilia.net
5 Although all spiders (including non-web-building spiders) produce and use silk, once spiders reach adulthood, web-building is primarily the domain of the female spider.
6 Spiders are, however, grouped with insects and other invertebrates in the taxonomic phylum, Arthropoda.
7 According to the World Spider Catalog (2015), of almost 50,000 known spider species, only a nominal 22 species are considered social. A notable exception (S. dumicola) is discussed under the ‘Spider maternalism’ section of this article.
8 For instance, in the Pueblo and Navajo tradition, the ‘spider woman’ is a mother-weaver, an original universal creator, and one whose creative impulse is not limited to the preservation of her own genetic code (Hillyard Citation1994, 20–22). See also Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in which the original tale of Arachne connects spiders and women to a celebrated form of creativity through the art of weaving. A conflicted figuring of the creativity of the spider mother is also captured by French artist Louise Bourgeois’ nine-metre tall marble and steel sculpture, Maman [Mummy], an ode to Bourgeois’ mother, who—like the ‘spider woman’ mother-weaver figure in Amerindian mythology—was a ‘weaver’; a ‘clever’, ‘helpful’ and ‘protective’ presence (Quinn Citation2017, 190). The menacing form of Bourgeois’ sculpture, however, confounds a purely benevolent maternal spider narrative.
9 For Primo Levi (Citation1989, 143–144), the figure of the maternal spider is not so much dispassionate as straddling the passions with terrible metabolic desire. Levi’s spider mother is both creator and monster; an ‘enemy mother who envelops and encompasses, who wants to make us re-enter the womb from which we have issued, bind us tightly to take us back to the impotence of infancy’. This vision of the maternal spider figures animal (female) reproductive power as both generative and destructive, the spider-mother-weaver trembling a thin line between protection and entrapment, between life and death.
10 —noting that, as previously mentioned, sociality is a rare characteristic of spiderly lives. Interestingly, sociality has been observed in normally ‘solitary’ spiders, presumably as an adaptive behaviour to scientific housing conditions that force proximity (Krafft and Cookson Citation2012, 10).
11 —noting that, where Edelman’s critique of the dominant culture of ‘the Child’ embeds a negation of life/futurity, Sandilands enrols a queer ecological perspective that ‘insists on the future as a matter of cultivating flourishing, multispecies relationships in the present’ (Neimanis and Sandilands Citation2018).
12 Curiously, we also have a literary model of heterodirected (even trans-species!) spider maternalism in which life and death are interwoven in E.B. White’s classic, Charlotte’s Web (Citation1952).
13 —as argued in similar ways by Jennifer Hamilton and Astrida Neimanis (Citation2019) and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (Citation2012), posthumanist innovation must resist a ‘regime of disposability’ in which critique is privileged only when it ‘breaks with the past’. Arachnomadology is similarly additive; rather than working to displace existing posthumanist theorising of insect nomadisms, it enrols a feminist ethos of embodied enagagement in imaginatively and materially enlarging this vision, via cognitive/erotic adventuring within spider/webbed worlds.
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Ally Bisshop
Ally Bisshop (Ph.D. UNSW Sydney 2018) is an artist and scholar whose work intersects with discourses across posthumanist, feminist new materialist, artistic research, biophilosophical, and queer ecocritical studies. Drawing upon training in both the arts and sciences, her research enrols transdisciplinary methods and concepts to think critically and creatively about the material, affective, ethical and relational thresholds between human and nonhuman, and the generative possibilities of artistic mediations of human-nonhuman encounters. Since 2017, she has been a research affiliate of Berlin-based artist Tomás Saraceno’s Arachnophilia project.