Representing insect sexualities in Life in the Undergrowth and Green Porno

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhat does it mean to represent insect sexualities? What are the technologies that one uses to make insect bodies visible? In this article, I examine two series in order to examine representations of insect sexualities. In the documentary Life in the Undergrowth, famed British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s hushed tones tell us that new technologies of seeing are making new worlds visible. In the second, Isabella Rossellini stars in the series Green Porno, in which she uses biologically accurate costumes to blow up insect bodies to human size, using the costumes as technologies of seeing to help her audience visualize how insects have sex. Here, the costumes themselves become ways of knowing insect bodies while simultaneously rendering them as spectacular media moments. I rely upon feminist media studies of representations of wildlife to ask how assumptions around gender and sexuality continue to shape contemporary depictions of the insect world in Sir David Attenborough’s series Life in the Undergrowth, whereas I argue that Green Porno represents a queering of traditional documentaries on insects and examine what possibilities this might provide us with for rethinking insect sexualities—from monogamy and heterosexual reproduction to S/M, queer sex, and polyamory.