A symbiological approach to sex, gender, and desire in the Anthropocene
Gagnier, RA
Date: 17 March 2017
Journal
Angelaki
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
Publisher DOI
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 ...
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 stabilised 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.
Recent developments in molecular biology imply that classic distinctions between
nature and nurture or biology and culture are not applicable to the human ecological niche.
Research in epigenetics shows that the effects of culture on nature go all the way down to
the gene and up to the stratosphere, and the effects of biology on culture are similarly
inextricable (Gilbert; Griffiths; Meloni). Living systems almost invariably involve the
interaction of many kinds of organisms with a diversity of technologies. The
Anthropocene—the age of human cultures and technologies impacting on natural
environments—changes rapidly, and to understand and manage its functioning requires
perspectives from each domain. Symbiology is the study of such relations-in-process. The
kinds of relations we study include mutualism, parasitism, domination, recognition,
separation, solubility, symmetric mutuality (relations among equals in power or status),
asymmetric mutuality (relations among unequals--parents/offspring, teacher/pupil,
human/nonhuman animals), reciprocity, alienation, isolation, autonomy, and so forth, and
these relations are discernible throughout nature and all cultures, implying a politics.1
The first part of this essay will describe a symbiological approach to gender and
sexuality; the second, a symbiological approach to literature and some examples of gender
and sexuality in symbiological literature. 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.
English
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