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Illdisciplined Gender pp 115–135Cite as

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

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Part of the book series: Crossroads of Knowledge ((CROKNOW))

Abstract

Thorough this chapter I discuss how the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in nature saw men, women and hermaphrodites and in his classification of the plant kingdom presented a full repertoire of nonnormative sexual combinations of stamens and pistils. Linnaeus’ language, categorisations and representations of the plants are analysed as a controversy about meaning in which the conceptualising of men, women and hermaphrodites took shape. The question is 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 substantial two-sex model. Linnaeus’ sexual system has been discussed in previous research but without taking seriously the hermaphroditic, nonnormative and queer aspects of his botany. What role had Linnaean botany in the emergence of a new sexual body? Were the plant kingdom’s hermaphrodites and sexually unconventional plants really so difficult to place and hushed up in eighteenth-century culture and science as has previously been claimed?

This essay is an expanded version of Chap. 2 in Bondestam (2010).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The formation of scientific concepts and the politics of language, representations and the corporeal are discussed in Cooter 2010; Davidson 2001, and Daston 1994.

  2. 2.

    Translations from the Latin to the English are made by Dr Anna Fredriksson.

  3. 3.

    The power of analogy and metaphor to organise, open up and lock in scientific visions is discussed in Schiebinger 2004; Broberg 1975, and Stepan 1996.

  4. 4.

    There were other reasons behind Siegesbeck’s rejection of the sexual system. See Eriksson 1969.

  5. 5.

    On contemporary reactions to the sexual system, see also Broberg 1990–1991.

  6. 6.

    On bodily characteristics, language and fragmentation regarding whether a collection of organs are subsumed under the category of sex, see Butler 1990. On identity, difference and knowledge, see Foucault 1973.

  7. 7.

    According to Gunnar Eriksson, Linnaeus’ main purpose with the lecture was not to establish the stability of the species concept but rather to make the words of the Bible reasonable to a modern natural scientist. See Eriksson 1969. On Linnaeus’ early species concept, see Broberg 1975.

  8. 8.

    The hermaphrodite was still an important category in Swedish science in the early twentieth century when physicians, psychiatrists and sexologists were trying to define how so-called sexual perversions such as exhibitionism, fetishism, masochism and paedophilia and also homo- and bisexuality could appear. These nonreproductive desires had no connection to men’s and women’s supposedly ‘natural physical cravings’ for procreation and were perhaps considered, at least in case of bisexuality, as some kind of psychological equivalent to hermaphroditism. See Bondestam 2010.

  9. 9.

    On dissonance in relation to stable and apparently self-evident categories concerning sex and sexuality, see Rosenberg 2002.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Maja Bondestam

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  1. Maja Bondestam
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Correspondence to Maja Bondestam .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Jacob Bull

  2. Department for Literature and Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Margaretha Fahlgren

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Bondestam, M. (2016). When the Plant Kingdom Became Queer: On Hermaphrodites and the Linnaean Language of Nonnormative Sex. In: Bull, J., Fahlgren, M. (eds) Illdisciplined Gender. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15272-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15272-1_7

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