Queer human microbiopolitics by Tarsh Bates on The Seed Box

What does it mean to be human when we recognise our bodies as multispecies ecologies?

My research explores the intimate and fraught contact zones of biology, aesthetics, culture and care between Homo sapiens and Candida albicans, the yeast commonly known as thrush. C. albicans is one of the hundreds of viral/bacterial/fungal/insect species dwelling in the complex ecology that is the human body. I consider the human body as a queer ecology, a complex and diverse entanglement of relationships between H. sapiens, Candida albicans, other microbes, culture and technology. Queer ecologies disrupt the mutually constitutive apparatuses of “nature” and “sexuality,” and reconfigure the entanglements of biology, sex, sexuality, intimacy, affiliation, geography, geology, ecology, culture and technology (Sandilands 2016). This figuration enables me to explore how CandidaHomo relationships are constituted and who gets to be at the table, when and where. The human body is a profligate beat of myriad more–than–human sexualities, where human cells and microbes, including C. albicans, replicate, procreate and propagate.

Read the rest on The Seed Box: https://theseedbox.se/blog/tarsh-bates-queer-human-microbiopolitics/