ABSTRACT
Transgender studies and critical plant studies often center around a similar set of epistemological, ontological, and sociopolitical issues—questions of identity, taxonomy, objectification, and temporality, for instance. Both fields are rooted in the demand that the “object” of study—trans folks and plant life, respectively—take a meaningful and agential role in their field of knowledge production. Transgender theorist Susan Stryker calls this “knowledge with [rather than] knowledge of,” and argues for the importance of “experiential or embodied knowledge” in discussions of trans life. Similarly, vegetal philosopher Michael Marder holds that the plant contributes to theoretical discourse “in its very being,” through its embodied lifeways. Building on scholarly work in both fields, I will attend to the ways in which trans and nonbinary authors invoke plant life collaboratively and non-hierarchically in attempts to figure and practise nonnormative gender. This chapter surveys these interconnections between plant studies and transgender literature, highlighting the ways in which vegetality grows, surrounds, fortifies, grounds, and shades trans writing. First, I provide a working definition of critical plant studies, particularly in its philosophical and literary modes. Then, I offer a survey of transgender literature that engages collaboratively with plant life. Texts discussed include Callum Angus’s story collection, A Natural History of Transition (2021), as well as poetry and nonfiction by Ely Shipley, Oliver Baez Bendorf, Qwo-Li Driskill, Rose Zinnia, and Jody Chan. I argue that figurations of and collaborations with plant life enable trans writers to simultaneously situate transness as natural and challenge mainstream discourses of nature. For the trans author, working at the ecotone of legibility and illegibility, the plant’s otherness, fluidity, and modularity make it a guide and an ally. This chapter attests to the intimate connections between critical plant studies and transgender living and writing.
