Queer naycha
Oh not Kew ffs. Kew is one of the best things on the planet (albeit far too expensive now).
Oh do stop. Write an opera about queer idenninies if you like but leave Kew out of it. Kew is a botanical garden, not a museum of queer idenninies.
The 2/2 has disappeared so I’ll finish the sentence for them – “Although we’re aware that some people view the word as a homophobic insult we really don’t care, because we’re trendier than that. Sucks to be you, sorry.”
And all for what? How many “queer” people feel excluded from Kew anyway?
Have you ever looked into the eyes of a tree? I mean really looked?
I spent some wonderful hours at Kew when I visited England last time. As a botanist, I am 100% confused about the idea of “queer” plants. Plants are plants. They do not have “identities”. Their sex is rather restricted, with their pollen spread by wind or critters. “Queering” plants is…I’m not supposed to say this word, but I’m going to…stupid.
As for Millie’s question, how this connects with LGBTQ is that everything is about LGBTQ (well, mostly T). Every part of the world, every part of the universe, is about them. We must all think about them at all times, and if we are not, or if we are thinking wrongheaded thoughts, such as a man cannot become a woman, then we are to be exiled and reeducated.
And I’m not aware of plants changing sex, so fuck right off, queer Kew.
I did once look into the eyes of a tree that looked like something painted by Arthur Rack’em.. It winked at me, & then made an obscene but inviting gesture with one of its smaller branches. When I did not respond as it clearly wanted, it quivered its leaves & started muttering about treephobes, turfs, & pronouns. I found it all very keweer.
All this “queering” of stuff might be a sign that many people trying to be creative or trying to find new ways to sell stuff, have just run out of ideas. Assuming that they had any ideas to begin with. Take something that exists, that they can’t really improve on or say anything new about that is intelligent and just call it “queered” and then claim that “queerness” was always there, always existed.
How I imagine this show:
“Queer people have often worn / drawn / touched / sniffed / looked at / been in the vicinity of flowers. And, well, here are some flowers which might or might not have been those very ones!” *points at flowers*
I was one of those gender-nonconforming autistic little girls who is never happier than when lifting a rock to find out what insects are underneath, and who shares Weird Nature Facts with anyone in the vicinity. Nobody wanted to hear them then, but apparently they’re all the rage NOW as long as they’re plastered with rainbow glitter.
But what gets me about all the Queer Nature stuff is that it begs the question. Avocados have an interesting system where some plants have flowers that are male in the morning one day and female in the evening the next day, and some vice versa, which is good for genetic diversity (inbreeding is bad; don’t tell the racial-purity types) and important to understand if you’re an avocado farmer. But how do we know that the avocado does this? What is it that changes about the avocado flower? What is it that makes the avocado, in the older sense of the word, a queer plant? Do its petals go from pink to blue? Does it develop macho thorns rather than tender petals? No, what happens is that it stops producing egg cells and starts producing pollen cells. (Let’s leave gametophytes, sporophytes, and the alternation of generations for another day.) It’s the same as the clownfish, the honeybee, the leopard slug, the seahorse, the whiptail lizard, and whatever else we’ve got in the rainbow zoo this week. You can’t argue that these animals are unusual and special (ie queer) in how they reproduce unless you accept the premise that the sexes are male and female, and they’re differentiated by the kind of gametes the organism produces.
@Piglet,
Well now you’re just being essentialist. And as long as I can accuse you of essentialism, I win.
(Also, what’s with this weird obsession with plant reproduction, pervert?)
One helluva lot of plants produce both male and female gametes from the one plant body; sometimes from the same flowers (being ‘hermaphroditic’) and sometimes from separate male and female flowers growing on the same plant body, being ‘monoecious,’ and sometimes with ‘perfect’ flowers, each flower producing both male and female gametes, and thus being capable as a last resort of ‘selfing;’ ie self-pollination .
Animal species in which individuals are of different sexes, either male or female but not both, are ‘gonochoric,’ which is the opposite of ‘hermaphroditic’. Snails are examples of hermaphroditic animals; at a guess because in searching for a mate, the poor old snail is too slow to get out of (his + her) own way. So rather than say ‘oh, it’s you again’ they have to say with as much feigned surprise as they can muster: ‘Oh damn! It’s me again!’. Snails thus make their lonely ways on the world uttering torrents of curses of self-derision and self-pity over their own condition, with the more musical among them singing endless laments for themselves and their own separate snailey plights.
What A Maroon: I may be a pervert, but the plant reproduction obsession is because we’d be awfully hungry without it.
My first visit to Kew would have been around the time that far too expensive would have been uttered in protest at the 150% increase in the price of admission on changing from one old penny to one new penny at decimalisation of the coinage. By contrast, dog owners saw no such imposition on the the price of a dog license.
Piglet,
Yeah, sorry if the sarcasm didn’t come through. I was riffing on the kind of comments I see from TRAs when someone talks about the biological basis of sex.
What A Maroon: oh, the sarcasm came through just fine. I was fighting fire with fire!
Pah! They’re 40 years behind the times. In the early ’80s, Morrissey used to take to the stage with gladioli when performing with The Smiths. As he self-described as a celibate homosexual back then, I’m sure that his brandishing of the flowers in various ways – as a sword, dance partner, lash, etc. – was symbolic of something related to his sexuality. Barry Humphries’ cross-dressed alter ego, Dame Edna Everage, always had a vase of gladioli on stage at every performance.
That’s got to mean something….hasn’t it? Are gladioli the queerest flower?
Hence, Glad to be Gay
#13, good call, Piglet. Even Billy Bragg was queering the gladioli in the eighties.
Hasn’t Bragg since “transed” that song?