Fugitive, Cryptic, Queer: Fungal Forms of Belonging

No other organism better represented the nebulous boundary between botany and zoology in the Victorian imagination than fungus. For the first half of the nineteenth century, it was not clear whether fungi should be classed with plants or animals. Although, by the end of the century, the taxonomic confusion was resolved by creating a new third kingdom, fungi were still figured as “quasi-animals.” Hunger for flesh—as well as a resemblance to flesh—continued to animate fungus in the Victorian imagination. As animacy structures hierarchical logic, the animatedness of fungus became an important testing ground for the taxonomic ranking of quasi-animals and quasi-plants in the Victorian period. Taking a long view of mycological history, this paper will consider how fungi model fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Even as mycological research helped to police biological hierarchies, fungal life also indexed the difficulty of pinning down lifeforms that flourished in the interstices of taxonomic orderings, creating a space where alternative narratives of life, intimacy, and relationality could emerge. As this paper will show, the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.