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Pollen

Chapter of: Microbium: The Neglected Lives of Micro-matter(pp. 99–112)

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Metadata
TitlePollen
ContributorJoela Jacobs(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.53288/0396.1.08
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/microbium-the-neglected-lives-of-micro-matter/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightJoela Jacobs
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2023-09-07
Long abstractWhen you are inhaling pollen, your body has been penetrated by a little package of plant sperm. Pollen grains are multicellular organisms that contain male sex cells, and their job is to get this sperm to the egg to facilitate fertilization. For that, they hitch a ride on insects or trust their fate to wind, water, and any other moving means, including us. Yet most human-pollen encounters are only noticed when they result in an allergic reaction. Allergies have been on the rise, which is at least partly because pollen is too: Pollen counts have been going up in urban environments due to the tendency of city planners to plant male trees, which avoids problems with fruit falling on heads, cars, and sidewalks. Yet this also means that pollen is not absorbed by female trees and left roaming the streets to enter human noses instead. This self-made allergy problem demonstrates that we often seem to neglect what pollen is and does: As a miniscule sperm delivery mechanism, it is all about sex. Accordingly, pollen’s cultural history has predominantly been focused on attraction rather than allergic aversion, and because of that, pollen has shaped not only our understanding of plant fertility, but also human ideas about eroticism and sexuality, reproduction and desire.
Page rangepp. 99–112
Print length14 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Keywords
  • pollen
  • micro-matter
  • reproduction
  • sexuality
  • vegetal eroticism
Contributors

Joela Jacobs

(author)
Assistant Professor of German Studies at University of Arizona
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2250-8879

Joela Jacobs is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of Arizona and founder of the Literary and Cultural Plant Studies Network (plants.arizona.edu). Her research focuses on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century German literature and its intersections with the environmental humanities, specifically plants, animals, and environmentalist culture, as well as Jewish studies, the history of sexuality, and the history of science. She has published on monstrosity, multilingualism, literary censorship, biopolitics, animal epistemology, zoopoetics, phytopoetics, cultural environmentalism, and contemporary German Jewish identity.