Bruce Bagemihl - Biological Exuberance

It is believed that homosexual activities promote growth throughout nature… while excessive heterosexual activities lead to decay in nature…. The balance of these forces is dependent on human action…. The Bedamini do not… experience any inconsistency in the cosmic equation of homosexuality with growth and heterosexuality with decay.

Nor is the association of homosexuality with fecundity unique to this example. As we saw earlier, the renewal and abundance of nature is ensured during Mandan, Yup’ik, and many other cultures’ ceremonies by the symbolic reenactment of animal homosexuality and ritual displays of gender mixing. The Bimin-Kuskusmin human-animal androgynes (who are themselves celibate or postreproductive) are seen as embodiments of fertility, life essence, and earth’s creative powers, while the presence of transgendered and nonreproductive animals is regarded as vital for the productivity of domesticated herds among the Navajo and Chukchi. Rather than being seen as “barren” or counterproductive, then, homosexuality, transgender, and nonbreeding are considered essential for the continuity of life. This is the fundamental “paradox” at the heart of indigenous thinking on alternate genders and sexualities—something that is not, of course, really considered paradoxical at all in these worldviews. It is important that scientists working in chaos theory, biodiversity/Gaia studies, and post-Darwinian evolution acknowledge their genuine affinities with indigenous perspectives. But this process will be complete only when scientists themselves understand this “paradox” and no longer see any inconsistency in the equation of homosexuality/transgender with the vitality of the natural world.

In his study of the 12,000-year-old shamanic worldview of the Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) people and their ancestors, anthropologist Karl Schlesier makes explicit the concordance between ancient and modern perspectives, and the essence of sexual and gender variability that is at its core. According to Schlesier, “The new scientific paradigm initiated by physics and astronomy during the last decades has not only overthrown the rationalistic description that has dominated science for merely four centuries, but is testing concepts regarded as factual in the Tsistsistas world description. The Tsistsistas world description understands power (‘energy’) in the universe… as cosmic power”—a power that controls quantum phenomena and exhibits paradoxical properties, including being both local and nonlocal, causal and noncausal (among others). Central to this understanding is the figure of the gender-mixing or two-spirit shaman, the “halfman-halfwoman” who is a living exemplar of the reconciliation of contraries, a “traveler in the androgynal quest” uniting within him/herself apparently contradictory categories. This conjunction of opposites is seen as a return to the original and timeless state of all matter—the primordial mystery of totality. Homosexuality/transgender is therefore regarded as a hierophany , a manifestation of this sacred oneness and plentitude. “This organic Tsistsistas world description, in which all parts of the universe were interrelated, saw life as wondrous…. This is perhaps the greatest achievement of shamanism since its development:… to interpret the world with all its manifestations as a place of miracles, transformations, and immortality.” 138

On the eve of the twenty-first century, human beings have begun to reimagine and reconfigure some of the most fundamental aspects of nature and culture. Stepping into a social and biological landscape that could scarcely have been imagined a few decades ago, homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered people are now offering new paradigms of sexuality and gender for all of us to consider. As part of this process, they are looking simultaneously to indigenous and futuristic sources of inspiration:

In the search for new vocabularies and labels, terms like shapeshifter and morphing have come to be used to refer to gender identity and sexual style presentations and their fluidity. Shapeshifter, originally from Native American culture, was introduced into current popular culture from science fiction, especially a new offshoot of the cyberpunk subgenre made famous by William Gibson and exemplified by the work of Octavia E. Butler, the African-American author of the Xenogenesis series. Butler’s books are inhabited by genetics-manipulating aliens, a polygendered species whose sexuality is multifarious and who are “impelled to metamorphosis,” whose survival in fact depends upon their “morphological change, genetic diversity and adaptations.”

Ironically, one need not look into the future or on “alien worlds” to find appropriate models: shape-shifting and morphing creatures are not merely the stuff of fantasy. The animal world—right now, here on earth—is brimming with countless gender variations and shimmering sexual possibilities: entire lizard species that consist only of females who reproduce by virgin birth and also have sex with each other; or the multigendered society of the Ruff, with four distinct categories of male birds, some of whom court and mate with one another; or female Spotted Hyenas and Bears who copulate and give birth through their “penile” clitorides, and male Greater Rheas who possess “vaginal” phalluses (like the females of their species) and raise young in two-father families; or the vibrant transsexualities of coral reef fish, and the dazzling intersexualities of gynandromorphs and chimeras. In their quest for “postmodern” patterns of gender and sexuality, human beings are simply catching up with the species that have preceded us in evolving sexual and gender diversity—and the aboriginal cultures that have long recognized this. The very melding of indigenous cosmologies and fractal sexualities suggested in the passage above is already well under way—but within the realm of science fact , not fiction.

It is early morning in the mountains of Sierra Chincua in central Mexico. Covered with what appear to be the golden and orange leaves of autumn, the forest is aquiver, “her trillion secrets touchably alive” 140—but these are not leaves, nor is it autumn. The sound of a distant waterfall fills the air—but no cascading rapids are nearby. It is the fluttering of hundreds of thousands of paper-thin wings—for this is the overwintering site of Monarch Butterflies, resting after their epic migration across North America. They cling to the trees in such numbers that the branches are bent toward the ground, and the forest floor is carpeted with their densely packed bodies. Some of the butterflies are in tandem, since mating often takes place at these overwintering sites. And some of this mating is homosexual: one study of an overwintering site revealed that at the peak of mating activity, more than 10 percent of the Monarch pairs were composed of two males, while later in the season, this percentage rose to nearly 50 percent. 141When the Monarchs take to the air en masse, they form a thick orange cloud that engulfs the trees and requires thirty minutes to pass. Seen from above, their multitude is staggering: the forest seems to be on fire, burning with millions of tiny butterfly-flames. This image is a powerful evocation of the central theme of Biological Exuberance: the glorious multiplicity and bounty of life, what author Hakim Bey has called “the magnificent overabundance of reality.” 142

We conclude this section with a reflection on where this journey through the speculations of post-Darwinian evolution, chaos theory, and biodiversity studies has led us—a journey along circuitous routes, following clues that at times seemed far-flung, straying down paths that never quite lost us (in spite of their tangential meanderings). Our final resting spot—the concept of Biological Exuberance—lies somewhere along the trajectory defined by these three points (chaos, biodiversity, evolution), although its exact location remains strangely imprecise. 143Seen in the light of Biological Exuberance, animal homosexuality/transgender and other nonreproductive behaviors finally “make sense”—they find an intuitive connection to a larger pattern. Yet they are still, paradoxically, “inexplicable,” since they continue to elude conventional definitions of usefulness. Nothing, in the end, has really been “explained”—and rightly so, for it was “sensible explanations” that ran aground in the first place.