Cellular pleasure as a mechanism of evolution, with Patricia Kaishian

In Module 6 of Rewilding Mythology, Patricia Kaishian reads from her essay, "Purple, Thunder, Mushrooms, Desire". Weaving a biological love story, she asks: can we wrest desire from the exclusive grip of animal experience? Do biological exchanges simply operate as dispassionate transactions? She contends that these logics do not deliver satisfactory explanations for the world's abounding beauty and mutualistic interactions. Is pleasure at the heart of evolution?
✴︎ ABOUT THIS SESSION ✴︎
Lichenized Lovers: Rewilding Romance With Symbiosis
Using a lens of Queer Ecology, we can follow a line of love goddesses back to our symbiotic multicellular origins. Aphrodite, born of foam, reminds us of our oceanic ancestors. Inanna teaches us how to tie our roots together in the underworld, recalling the symbiotic origin of plant and fungal root systems. How can we understand heteronormativity as incompatible with the wild biodiversity present in both sexual expression and romantic traditions? As we compost normative ideas about sacred couples and love stories, we arrive at lichenized multi-species lovers, more suited to the tangled, biodiverse ecosystems we actually live inside.
✴︎ ABOUT DR. PATRICIA ONONIWU KAISHIAN ✴︎
Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, and a professor of biology with Bard Prison Initiative. Her research focuses on fungal taxonomy, diversity and evolution, as well as queer theory and philosophy of science. Her forthcoming book, Forest Euphoria: a queer bestiary, will be published by Spiegel & Grau.
⤹ ABOUT THE COURSE:
For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of mythologies. Just as landscapes were stolen and terraformed so were whole pantheons uprooted from their social and ecological contexts. How can we reroot, rewild, and retell? Rewilding Mythology is an eight-week multi-teacher online course, curated by Sophie Strand, featuring a pantheon of storytellers, artists, scholars, practitioners and more. Find out more about + purchase this course at advaya.life/co...
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