Pollination and the Horrors of Yield: Scarcity and Survival in the Glasshouse

Abstract

 Pollination is a lynchpin anchoring multispecies survival, but in the racial capitalist configurations of condensed environment agriculture, pollination politics are informed by life-depleting and carceral logics, as well as imaginaries steeped in racial hierarchies and sex binaries that ground future survival in colonial, heteropatriarchal, and normative terms. This article argues that pollination politics are focused on intensifying agriculture and increasing yield within carceral infrastructures, and that the orchestration of pollination is governed by socio-sexual schemas about fitness and fecundity that are governed by a normative reproductive futurism. Joining feminist STS and queer theory, the article traces how forms of life in greenhouses and other agricultural infrastructures are “gardened” in the interests of modes of sustainability that are fundamentally exploitative. Biodiversity is domesticated and depoliticized, and all forms of human and non-human vitality are directed towards increased yield. The naturalization of sexual difference influences how plant life is managed, but also how temporary foreign labor is biopolitically managed in controlled environment agricultural infrastructures. The article reads the perverse politics of scarcity through the South African film Glasshouse (2021) and ends by speculating on how “wild pollination” might present more decolonial, anti-racist, queer, and liberatory sustainable futures.