Queer Reproductions in Vergil’s Georgics and Brian Britigan’s Golden

Abstract

Pairing Vergil’s Latin poem, the Georgics, with Golden, a 2012 painting by Brian Britigan, I explore the sexualities and ecologies of animal bodies.
 First, I argue that Golden responds to the “bugonias” of the Georgics, scenes in which a dead ox spontaneously generates bees. Through the image of one species emerging from another Vergil and Britigan queer straight ideas of reproduction in different ways. Vergil’s queering is processual, describing bugonia as a collision of human and nonhuman bodies and practices. In Britigan’s paintings, which omit human figures, queerness is stylistic. Britigan pays homage to the foundational work of Thomas Hart Benton while reworking Benton’s beliefs about sex/gender and sexuality.
 Painted just a few years after CCD devastated the world’s honeybees, Golden poignantly represents the hope of life even after extinction. While earlier criticizing Britigan’s human-less nature, I conclude by considering that the regeneration of life may require our absence.