Zones of Obscurity: Representations of Social and Vegetal Reproduction under Patriarchal Capitalis

Combining critical plant studies and social reproduction theory (SRT), this project asks how
representations of plants in literature, music, and film defamiliarise capitalism's domination of social/vegetal
reproduction. Capital accumulation is facilitated by patriarchal discourses and practices that construct certain
human and nonhuman bodies as feminine, reproductive, and plant-like. Social reproduction includes childbirth,
care work and subsistence farming; vegetal reproduction comprises cycles of decay, regeneration and growth that
sustain plant life (Marder, 2013). Capitalist economics situate reproduction as feminine and non-productive,
relegating social/vegetal reproduction to the margins of much economic and cultural theory. Through detailed
close reading, this project will examine how aesthetic representations of vegetal reproduction provide imagined
modes of resistance to the conscription of plants and people in processes of capital accumulation