Zones of Obscurity: Representations of Social and Vegetal Reproduction under Patriarchal Capitalis

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Combining critical plant studies and social reproduction theory (SRT), this project asks how representations of plants in literature, music, and film defamiliarise capitalism's domination of social/vegetal reproduction. Capital accumulation is facilitated by patriarchal discourses and practices that construct certain human and nonhuman bodies as feminine, reproductive, and plant-like. Social reproduction includes childbirth, care work and subsistence farming; vegetal reproduction comprises cycles of decay, regeneration and growth that sustain plant life (Marder, 2013). Capitalist economics situate reproduction as feminine and non-productive, relegating social/vegetal reproduction to the margins of much economic and cultural theory. Through detailed close reading, this project will examine how aesthetic representations of vegetal reproduction provide imagined modes of resistance to the conscription of plants and people in processes of capital accumulation