Libertine botany: Vegetal sexualities, vegetal forms

This article unearths a tradition of libertine botany that emerges in the seventeenth century with the writings of Guy de La Brosse (1586–1641) and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619–1655), and moves forward subterraneanly into our own, more ecologically-focused times. This tradition imagines vegetal life, in the flexible and formally inventive pleasures it enables, as a model for human sexuality, thereby countering the tendency to impose human categories (such as gender difference) on plant life. Vegetality functions here as a scene of queer animacy, in which affects and sensations are mobilized across different kinds of bodies and diverse modes of being.