Professional mycologist Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian demolishes any idea of rigid boundaries and hierarchies in this glorious celebration of the diversity and queerness of nature.
In an era when the President of the United States is attacking the beautiful diversity of life at every turn, it was wonderful to read Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian.
Kaishian is an academic specialising in the study of fungi, and this memoir explores her fascination with fungi and other forms of life that make a mockery of Trump’s outdated belief in rigid binaries and hierarchies. In nature, Kaishian says, queerness is everywhere. In Forest Euphoria, she takes us through a series of examples showing how fluid the boundaries are between genders, species and any other categorisation that humans might choose to impose.
Slipper snails, for example, all start out as male, and then at some point in their life cycle, they all pile on top of each other and their sex is determined by their position in the mound, with some remaining male and others transitioning to female.
Then there’s the cassowary bird, which many Indigenous peoples of Australia and Papua New Guinea consider to be a sacred creature because of its blending of sexual traits. Modern scientists have confirmed that although cassowary males have a phallus, it is turned inward like a vagina except during mating. And females also have a phallus that is smaller but otherwise identical to the male’s. So there’s no clear binary.
In the world of fungi, things get even more complicated.
“It is common for a fungus to have more than two biological sexes, and some fungi, such as Schizophyllum commune, have as many as twenty-three thousand mating types.”
Forest Euphoria itself resists easy definition. I’ve called it a memoir, but it’s far from traditional in form or structure. It takes us swiftly from the personal to the scientific, from the deeply individual to the political, from the smallest scope of a single forest ‘sit spot’ to the widest scope of the planetary ecosystem.
Kaishian starts by exploring her early fascination with swamps and forests. As a kid who didn’t feel as if she fitted into any of the dominant categories of human life, she found refuge in these places. They gave her “a chance to move amphibiously, to shape-shift, to creep, to oscillate like algae in a riffle, to be neither a boy nor a girl and have no particular identity at all.”
Later, we discover how she discovered mycology and became an academic, and the story broadens out to include politics, race, colonisation, the climate crisis, and so much more.
I appreciated the insight that as we navigate the climate crisis today, we already have postapocalyptic peoples among us—those who have survived genocides, the destruction of their whole way of life, and can perhaps teach us how to deal with what’s coming. I also liked the use of “Plantationocene” to describe our epoch, making it clear that climate change is not just caused by humans but by a particularly exploitative, extractive form of human activity that began with plantation slavery.
And through all the personal stories and political investigations, the fascinating examples keep coming. Eels spend nearly their entire lives as intersex beings, only acquiring a particular sex determination in their last year of life. Jack-in-the-pulpit flowers start off asexual, then develop male flowers, then acquire both male and female structures, and finally transition to being entirely female.
Kaishian also broadens the idea of ‘queerness’ beyond sex and gender, using it as a way of demolishing all kinds of categories and boundaries, upending the human-centric narrative that we often live by, exploring different ways of looking at time, nature and a lot more aspects of life.
“Ultimately, queerness invites us all, regardless of our identities, to be more undefined, unclear, transitional, merging, interdependent, cooperative, and nonhierarchical—a very fungal way of being.”
It’s a surprising argument to come from a scientist, since science is usually about finding clarity and relies heavily on establishing categories with clear definitions. But I found it very refreshing, especially in these times when we’re being asked more and more to pick sides, to entrench ourselves in one group or another, to shed our compassion and empathy for others.
Now more than ever, we need a lot more merging, a lot more cooperation, a lot more undermining of hierarchies. The rigid, hierarchical way of thinking has brought us to a desperate place of political division and ecological catastrophe, so I’m happy to give a fungal way of being a try.
