A SYMBIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SEX, GENDER, AND DESIRE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Abstract

The first part of this essay describes a symbiological approach to gender and sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to world literatures and some examples of gender and sexuality in symbiological literatures. Both are intended to provide more intimate accounts of the Anthropocene than the typical big pictures of global warming and climate change. While grand and world-historical, to be sure, the Anthropocene also affects the most intimate aspects of our lives. Both sex and gender should be understood as the outcomes of developmental processes more or less stabilized by a wide variety of more or less variable factors in the loop of nature, culture, and technology. Understanding the nature of these processes and their social, biological, and technological causes is essential for comprehending the nature of gender, sex, and sexuality, and the extent to which these are mutable. The essay concludes with some reflections on love in the Anthropocene.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• world literatures
• symbiology
• sex
• gender
• desire
• ecocriticism
• biology
• technology
• biosemiotics

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This manifesto of a symbiological approach has much in common with process biology, actor-network-theory, and object-oriented ontologies, and may be considered a fellow traveller with the positions of Bruno Latour on actants and matters of concern, Isabelle Stengers on events and causes of thinking, and Andrew Pickering on the mangle of practice (see Latour; Stengers, “Including Nonhumans in Political Theory: Opening Pandora's Box?” in Braun and Whatmore; Pickering). It also has some sympathy with the “thing theory” of Jane Bennett and Bill Brown and the treatment of circulation in Arjun Appadurai (Bennett; Brown; Appadurai). However, the symbiology manifesto has actually evolved out of years of interdisciplinary research and administration, most recently at Egenis, the Centre for the Study of Life Sciences, at the University of Exeter, and out of a life-long study of the kinds of total environments that are presented in world literatures. I am also grateful to Dr Jos Smith, British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and Exeter's ECLIPSE Environmental Humanities Group, for comments on a draft of this essay.

2. The following section is indebted to the work of biologist and gender theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling. Her Myths of Gender (1985) pioneered biologically informed criticism of purportedly scientific accounts of gender difference, a project developed in new directions in Sexing the Body (2000). The outline of the stages of sexual differentiation here closely follows her Sex/Gender (2012). What follows is also indebted to the work of my long-time collaborator John Dupré. (See Barnes and Dupré; Dupré, Human Nature; idem, Processes; Fausto-Sterling, Myths; idem, Sexing; idem, Sex/Gender.)

3. This image of the protagonist's identification with the rice plant is striking for more than one reason. Professional biologists anecdotally advise that one cannot claim to be seriously engaged with a crop until one has dreamt that one is embodied as a crop plant in the ground. Symbiology is a biological process, but it is also a natural sympathy (see Hughes; Bray et al.).

4. For an operationalized study of how the language of global processes can become codified, self-referential, and detached from everyday language, concreteness, and human participants, with world-historical effects, see Moretti and Pestre on the World Bank.

5. One answer may well have been predicted in that very early breviary of Decadence, J.K. Huysmans's A Rebours (1884), frequently translated as Against Nature:

[A]rtifice was considered by Des Esseintes to be the distinctive mark of human genius. Nature, he used to say, has had her day; she has finally and utterly exhausted the patience of sensitive observers by the revolting uniformity of her landscapes and skyscapes. After all, what platitudinous limitations she imposes, like a tradesman specializing in a single line of business; what petty-minded restrictions, like a shopkeeper stocking one article to the exclusion of all others; what a monotonous store of meadows and trees; what a commonplace display of mountains and seas!

In fact, there is not a single one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and sublime, that human ingenuity cannot manufacture; no moonlit Forest of Fontainebleau that cannot be reproduced by stage scenery under floodlighting; no cascade that cannot be imitated to perfection by hydraulic engineering; no rock that papier-mâché cannot counterfeit; no flower that carefully chosen taffeta and delicately coloured paper cannot match! (22)

Yet A Rebours would lead Huysmans, as his contemporary Barbey d’Aurevilly put it, either to the foot of the cross or to the muzzle of a pistol, i.e., to religion or to suicide (in Huysmans, loc. 3768: Barbey, “Le Roman Contemporain,” Constitutionel (28 July 1884)). And others in their different ways, such as the Futurists or Walter Benjamin, have also observed that the love of technology for its own sake typically leads to war (see “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Epilogue” in Benjamin).