ASEXUAL ECOLOGIES

This co-authored contribution theorizes “asexual ecologies,” noting that asexuality has been sidelined in queer scholarship just as plants and fungi have historically been sidelined in popular culture and the sciences. As those nonhuman entities have recently been receiving more attention, their asexual reproductive capacities are largely ignored or lumped in with sexual reproduction. Further, queer ecologists and popular scientists often impose implicitly allosexual human values on nonhumans—for example, celebrating the “promiscuity” of fungi. This allocentrism is perturbing, given that, as Myra Hird reminds us, most organisms don't require sex for reproduction. As a corrective to this allocentrism, this chapter resists naturalizing human asexuality via the nonhuman, since referring to nonhumans as “asexual” is a matter of reproduction, not activity or identity. Nonetheless, there is still much that connects asexual humans to asexual(ly capable) nonhumans, and much we can learn conceptually and politically from the latter. Plants and fungi inspire us to focus less on the category of “asexual” itself and more on the behaviors, operations, and potentials it entails. They remind us of the need to build coalitions with disparate groups and prioritize nonsexual bonds.