Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores the death/life ecologies that flourish along the queered axes of spider reproductive behaviours – from cannibalistic sex to matricidal birth – and how the language and concepts used to describe these behaviours both reflect and distort heteronormative human accounts of gender/sex, life/death and thresholds between. It recalibrates storied accounts of spider sex, life and death through a critical, creative posthumanist approach to nonhuman life as zoē (Braidotti). It presents a queered reading of spider ethologies in which death is not life’s programmatic terminus, but another zoētic expression of desire: the endless reaching for affirmative becomings through (re)productive comminglings of bodies – whether by penetration, modulation, ingestion, or absorption. It argues how a spiderly weaving together of sex and death effects the conditions for the creative survival (inherence) of life itself. This zoētic analysis of spider ethologies proposes a novel figuration: the arachnomad – a sensuous assemblage of spider, web, affects and tangents – as a material model and heuristic for understanding nomadic subjectivities, and for queering the life/death relation.

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