“These Lusting, Incestuous, Perverse Creatures”

Abstract

This article traces the emergence of and shifts in ideas about plant sexuality in European literature from the late seventeenth century to the present, with a particular focus on influential British and a few less well-known German texts. Positioned as a specifically phytopoetic history of plants and sexuality, it demonstrates with the help of literature how plants have been shaping human culture—in this context, the sociocultural norms and understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality. Moving from vegetal visions of virtuous, virginal women-plants and their corruption by pollen and “plant prostitutes” to concerns about “crimes against nature” and the persecution of male same-sex desire, this history ultimately arrives at queer reproduction and pleasure as a collective endeavor.