Queer Darwin, Plant-Human Entanglements, and Aestheticist Art

This essay explores how English Aestheticist art of the 1870s drew inspiration from Charles Darwin to generate early visualisations of queer ecologies. Julia Margaret Cameron, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Edward Burne-Jones were attuned to Darwin’s queer undercurrents—including a generative unsettling of straight teleologies and imperatives to reproductive futurity—which they set to work in photographs, paintings, and drawings of plant-human entanglements. Their art mobilised ideas about the transformative power of unbounded desire, exploring how human and other-than-human forms were enmeshed by it. The aesthetic becomes a way to grasp—to luxuriate—in the unruly queerness of life itself.