When the Plant Kingdom Became Queer: On Hermaphrodites and the Linnaean Language of Nonnormative Sex

Abstract

The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus was not as in awe of the origins of life as the epigraph might imply, he did, however, in the middle of the eighteenth century present comprehensive findings about bisexual reproduction of animals and plants. In nature, he saw men, women and hermaphrodites and showed in his classification of the plant kingdom a full repertoire of non normative sexual combinations of stamens and pistils. In this essay, I have identified Linnaeus' gender-coded depictions of the plant kingdom and examined how his language, categorizations, representations and controversies about meaning constituted a key arena in which the conceptualizing of men, women and hermaphrodites took shape. It is remarkable how the Linnaean language of a queer plant kingdom was possible in an era that historians tell us is so clearly associated with binary thinking, the complementariness of genders and the establishment of a two-sex model. Linnaeus' sexual system has been discussed in previous research but, hitherto, without taking the hermaphroditic, non-normative and queer aspects of his botany seriously. In the following chapter, therefore, I explore the roles Linnaean botany played in the emergence of a new sexual body. I question whether the plant kingdom's hermaphrodites and 'sexually unconventional' plants were really so difficult to place in and were excluded from eighteenth-century culture and science as has previously been claimed? (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)