ABSTRACT
Plants are exquisitely vulnerable and astonishingly powerful at one and the same time: they simultaneously withdraw from and instantiate human schemes for cultivation and acculturation. It is this double function of the modern plant – as victimized, often femininized body and source of vital and revitalizing energy – that is taken up by the tradition of feminist thought that this chapter investigates in its raced and gendered implications. Feminist speculative fiction in the United States undertakes a reworking of the biopolitical plant – with its longstanding ties to femininity – as offering a possible exit from patriarchal oppression. Plant power is often explicitly made to operate in the service of white women’s social and political agency. In attending to vegetal being today, the entanglement of the plant – including the feminist plant – with this racist biopolitical legacy cannot be forgotten. Plant power is neither innocent nor neutral, and its history tracks and intersects with that of modernity more broadly.
