ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the work of thoughtful questioning by focusing on mulberries, and specifically on the biopolitics of mulberry–human relations in Southern Ontario and on possibilities for their ethically sensuous reorientation in current conditions of intimate complexity. Specifically, it focuses on two mulberry stories. In the first, it considers the biopolitical organization of mulberry species identity, which is the central axis of the “invasion” drama involving M. alba and M. rubra. In the second, it considers the everyday and systemic regulation of mulberry sexual expression, which is linked to questions of utility. Appreciating the sweetness of mulberry kinships should not be indiscriminate and does not mean simply leaving current mulberry worlds to continue as they are: remember that cultivation is a long, diverse and multiply storied co-creation between mulberry and human futurities, and that part of the problem in Southern Ontario may be that attentive cultivation is precisely what is lacking.
