The (Wo)man-Plant: Pleasure, Passivity, and Resistance in Feminine Vegetal Becomings

Abstract

abstract:This article examines eroticized woman-plant analogies within libertine texts and questions how becoming-plant both interfaces with, and enacts control over, feminine sexual subjects in and across Anglophone and Francophone contexts. First exploring feminine vegetal libertinism in Vincent Miller's The Man-Plant (1752) through Julien de la Mettrie's L'Homme-plante (1748), and then attending to the queerly desiring, plantlike body and the covert pleasures of its concealment in Anne Carson's poem "The Albertine Workout" (2014) through Marcel Proust's La prisonnière (1923), this article dwells upon a morbidly alluring becoming-plant that alternately espouses masculinist fantasies of possession and multiplies trajectories for oblique, feminine-vegetal sexual delights.