Suspended Munition: Mereology, Morphology, and the Mammary Biopolitics of Transmission in Simone Leigh’s Trophallaxis

Simone Leigh, “Knowledge as Collective Experience,” Creative Time Summit 2015 →.

See Charlotte Sleigh, “Brave New Worlds: Trophallaxis and the Origin of Society in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences 38, no. 2 (2002): 133–56. Entomologists such as Auguste Forel, Adele Fielde, and William Morton Wheeler alternately drew principles of “social hygiene,” slavery, primitivity, blackmail, bribery, internationalism, and pacifism from the life of ants. My observations, in this essay, are perhaps especially true for early entomologists in search of the origin of sociality.

Jennifer L. Morgan “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder’: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology, 1500–1770,” William and Mary Quarterly, no. 54 (1997): 167–92.

Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder,’” 191.

Morgan, “‘Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder,’” 186.

Londa L. Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Rutgers University Press, 2004), 53. See chapters 2 and 3, in particular, on the comparative anatomization of the breast.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 4–5.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 41–42.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 63.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 67–68.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 68–69.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 74.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 53.

Here, in using the conjoint “blackfemale,” I am thinking with a previous model, namely Toni Morrison’s Beloved (i.e., “whitefolks”). In reaching for language we find that the conjoin(ing) noun underscores the specificity of social positioning.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 64.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 148.

Schiebinger, Nature’s Body, 156, 158–59. We can see this kind of thinking even in the work of Darwin. See Darwin’s comments on the role of racial characteristics in sex selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).

In birds, feeding via regurgitation is sometimes called “crop milk.” See the following for an early, if not the earliest, use of the term: Oscar Riddle, Robert W. Bates, and Simon W. Dykshorn, “A New Hormone of the Anterior Pituitary,” Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine 29, no. 9 (1932): 1211–12.

Mark E. Suárez and Barbara L. Thorne, “Rate, Amount, and Distribution Pattern of Alimentary Fluid Transfer via Trophallaxis in Three Species of Termites (Isoptera: Rhinotermitidae, Termopsidae),” Annals of the Entomological Society of America 93, no. 1 (January 2000): 145–55.

Sleigh, “Brave New Worlds,” 133.

Abigail J. Lustig, “Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 302.

Sleigh, “Brave New Worlds,” 150.

William Morton Wheeler, ”The Social Insects: Their Origin and Evolution,” Nature, no. 122 (1928); and Sleigh, “Brave New Worlds,” 146, 150.

Indeterminancy and flexibility has been emphasized in scholarship on the question of race in early colonial slavery, but Morgan demonstrates that the process of imagining black women as vectors of racial inheritance and, thus, slave status began several decades before this code was enacted into law. As Morgan argues, it is through the bodies of black women that assumptions about race and status were conferred, formalized, and navigated. The Virginia legislative pronouncement, she argues, only belatedly codified hereditary racial slavery into English colonial law. See Jennifer L. Morgan, “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 22, no. 1 (2018): 1–17.

On this point, this essay is informed by social systems biologist Adria LeBoeuf’s work on trophallaxis. See LeBouef, “On Mammalian Breast Feeding” (n.d.); and her video “What is Trophallaxis?” →.

But in order to see it this way, Forel had to emphasize trophallaxis as a means of social bonding and kin survival over its associations with communal boundary regulation, caste, and immunity. Moreover, some forms of trophallaxis have been described in less communitarian terms, particularly that of parasitism. Some species of wasps have been described as nest invaders that restrain and force trophallaxis on captive hosts. See Hal C. Reed and Roger D. Akre, “Usurpation Behavior of the Yellowjacket Social Parasite, Vespula austriaca (Panzer) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae),” American Midland Naturalist 110, no. 2 (1983): 419–32; and Reed and Akre, “Colony Behavior of the Obligate Social Parasite Vespula austriaca (Panzer) (Hymenoptera: Vespidae),” Insectes Sociaux 30, no. 3 (1983): 259–73.

Sleigh, “Brave New Worlds,” 149–50.

Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003), 155. Here I draw on this essay, as well as the essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” in the same volume, to tease out some of the implications of Spillers’s thought, in light of Lacan’s mirror stage and Bruno Latour’s concept of an actant as that entity or activity which “modif(ies) other actors.” Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard University Press, 2004), 75. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (W. W. Norton, 2006).

Christina Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Duke University Press, 2009), 165.

Building on the work of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter suggests that sociogeny defines (human) being in a manner that is not reducible to physical laws. In fact, said laws are redefinable as sociogenetic or nature–culture laws because culture is not only what humans create but also what creates human being. Sociogeny suggests that cultural codes hold the potential to redirect “biology.” If the organismic body delimits the human species, then the body is itself culturally determined through the mediation of the socialized sense of self as well as through the “social” situation in which this self is placed. Wynter limits her discussion of what she calls the “sociogenic principle” to the activities and efficacies of the nervous system. See Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’” in National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, eds. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gomez-Moriana (Routledge, 2001), 30–66. In my forthcoming book, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (NYU Press, 2020), I extend and revise her theorization of sociogeny by considering what venturing beyond the nervous system reveals about the entanglement of semiosis and the organismic body.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 206.

Toni Morrison, Beloved (Knopf, 1987), 11.

Morrison, Beloved, 44.

Morrison, Beloved, 44.

Morrison, Beloved, 6.

Morrison, Beloved, 228.

An earlier version of Leigh’s Trophallaxis bore the title Queen Bee. My reading of Trophallaxis suggests an ironic meaning to the earlier title.

Butler’s The Feminine Monarchie (1634) was actually a revision of a text originally published by Joseph Barnes in 1609, which was itself the first full-length English-language book about beekeeping. However, Barnes and Bulter were not the first to describe the largest honeybee as a queen. Luis Mendez de Torres did so in 1586. His observation was later microscopically confirmed by Jan Swammerdam in 1670. As Cyrus Abivardi explains, although Aristotle noted that some authorities referred to the large ruler bee as the hive’s mother, he found the hypothesis unlikely, since “nature only arms males.” Because the hive’s “ruler” has a sting, Aristotle concluded that it must be the king, and the defenseless drones were, therefore, the females. See Cyrus Abivardi, “Honey Bee Sexuality: An Historical Perspective,” Encyclopedia of Entomology (Springer, 2008): 1840–43.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 203.

Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 205.

Nancy Leys Stepan, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” Isis 77, no. 2 (June 1986): 264.

Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 265–67.

Stepan, “Race and Gender,” 272.

Lorraine Datson, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, 100.

Datson, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 104.

Datson, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 105.

Datson, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 108–12.

Datson, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” 105.

By the 1920s, darker peoples of Africa, South America, and Asia were arguably at times depicted as more savage than “races” of ants—that is, morally inferior to ants. Examples include the work of Belgian entomologist Eduouard Bugnion, and H. G. Wells’s short story “The Empire of the Ants.” As Charlotte Sleigh puts it, “Psychologically speaking, ants were a paradox, for they shared brutishness with the ‘Negro’ or ‘Indian’ and a complex social order with the European.” See Sleigh, “Empire of the Ants: H. G. Wells and Tropical Entomology,” Science as Culture 10, no. 1 (2001): 64. I have extended this observation by identifying the manner in which sex/gender qualifies this insight.

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Duke University Press, 1984), 71.

Sharpe, Monstrous Intimacies, 161.

A number of Black Studies scholars are currently in the midst of an exciting conversation concerning a reconsideration of the idea of “world.” See, in particular, the work of Denise Ferriera da Silva and her important ethical call, on behalf of planetary existence writ large, for an “end to the world as we know it”: Da Silva, “An End to ‘This’ World,” interview by Susanne Leeb and Kerstin Stakemeir,” Texte Zur Kunst, April 12, 2019 →; and Da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2015): 81–97. In my work, on the question of the destructive/creative power of the black mater(nal), as mater, as matter vis-à-vis the metaphysics of “world,” I have focused on the particular problem of the definite article “the,” as a qualifier of “world.” In light of the work of Quentin Meillasoux and other realist approaches to “world” and anti-correlationist stances (i.e., some New Materialist approaches), I have argued for a disenchantment of the idea(l) of “the world” as a knowable concept while holding on to the notion of incalculable and untotalizable worldings. I argue that “the world,” and especially “the world as such,” fails as a concept, fails at knowability, but succeeds as an idea(l) of imperialist myth predicated on the absent presence of what I call the black mater(nal). This critique is not limited to any particular representation of “the world,” but is a rejection of the concept of “the world.” See Zakiyyah Jackson, “Sense of Things,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016). This argument is extended in my forthcoming book, Becoming Human.