ABSTRACT

In contrast to trees, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari celebrate rhizomes, subterranean stems of plants that grow horizontally and send out roots and shoots, not by design, but by chance and opportunity. For Deleuze and Guattari, a tree exemplifies a particular kind of hierarchical system with limited pathways and a central command. As the word "network" implies, rhizomes are groups of random and unpredictable nodes that interconnect. Deleuze and Guattari also explain that a "rhizome is made only of lines: lines of segmentarity and stratification as its dimensions and the line of flight or deterritorialization as the maximum dimension after which the multiplicity undergoes metamorphosis, changes in nature". In fact, rhizomes act a bit like water in that they want to flow unobstructed, and even when someone reroutes the water into pipes, the water finds weak spots, fissures, and cracks. Scholars have used Deleuze and Guattari to understand the gender/transgender continuum in new ways.