fungus gnats and female masculinity

a love letter in soil-loving solidarity

The soil of my indoor house plant was no longer static, it had begun to move. The grains of dirt were crawling over one another. It was a never-ending game of tetris, displacement, and replacement skilfully imitating a pile of soil. I raised my hand to it for a closer inspection. The crawling masses rose, not eloquently or particularly high but rather just centimetres above the earth, briefly becoming clouds to this much-more-alive-than-I-thought landscape. 

Fungus gnats. 

Image credits: Darell Gulin

The soil had grown wet and moist and the fungus gnats had moved in. They delighted in the white spots of fungal mould that festered in the badly lit and irreparably humid depths of my basement house. I looked at my pothos and all I could see were the crawling masses.

Fungus gnats live for around 24 days from egg to death, breeding from day 17 and producing up to 200 eggs. Unlike other species, the sex of the offspring is not determined by the fertilised egg and sperm, but rather is pre-determined by the female alone, with a single egg-producing fungus gnat producing only one sex of offspring. They remind me of my mother’s mother and my mother’s mothers offspring. I am born of a family coincidentally bent on ‘paternal genome elimination’. A family of femininity. Daughters birthing daughters birthing ‘daughters’. Judith Butler writes “gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original.” I was seemingly destined for femininity; born into it and surrounded by it. I am a reproduction of a reproduction. Yet my mimicry never quite achieved replication; there was a corruption in the transference, a glitch. 

Queer theorist Jack Halberstam explains the tomboy to be associated with “a ‘natural’ desire for the greater freedoms enjoyed by boys” until it begins to push at the edges of adolescence, where gender must be remodelled for an appropriately gendered world. I relished in my self-proclaimed tomboy status. I felt revered by girls and boys alike. The boys respected me and the girls relied upon me; a mediator between these precursory binaries. I had a sense of my corporeal capacity to straddle both and all. To exist alongside and in opposition to all genders; take what I please and revel in the opportunity outside of these binaries. 

The ego of a tomboyish five-year-old seemed to crack as my inversion became increasingly perverse. The other girls had mastered palatability and I was confused when things had changed. They had taken up roles I didn’t know we had auditioned for. Reliance became rejection and respect became repulsion. My masculinity had continued past preschool and into primary school and begun pushing at the edges of my adolescence. My once fawned over confidence was a threat to the new pink standard for politeness and restraint. My difference was becoming irreconcilable, and people began to notice. I wasn’t aware that these changes in my peers would forebode my obliged renouncement of masculinity. If I had been, maybe I would’ve mourned more, yearned more, fought more. Eventually I would grow up. On my 11th birthday I picked out a hot pink surfboard — perhaps the dykiest display of femininity one could muster — and my stint of masculinity had come to an end.

Yet, my refusal to give into my want to appear as the other didn’t last very long. Like many queers, the departure from adolescence marked my tentative return. 

Where the gnats proliferated along sex binaries at birth, my gender seemed to be proliferating at maturity. As a child I played Mum’s and Dad’s and as an adult I play boyfriend/girlfriend. Playing dress up and dress down with lovers in a game of inverted make-believe. 70s Women’s Liberation movements relished in the belief of lesbianism as entirely different from heterosexual sexuality. The butch had become a symbol of male mimicry, described by Moraga as a “slavish copy of heterosexual roles.” ‘Slavish’ as in servile and ‘slavish’ as in unoriginal. Victoria Brownworth declared in 1975 that lesbians are no longer “into role-play,” the butch had been cast aside as the lesbian community ascended to a moral sexual horizon free from the pitfalls of patriarchal heterosexuality. Embrace of the moral separatism of lesbian love positions itself not in opposition or subservience to patriarchy but as entirely free from it. 

I, on the other hand, feel entirely bound up by gender. Halberstam explains the gender of the butch lesbian, particularly the stone butch, to become visible through the repetitious performance of a gender that is “necessarily imperfect, flawed, and rough.” My lesbianism is in the yearning and the failures to play as boy. The attempts and the refusal to be viewed as girl. I was presupposed as girl before birth, we are a family of women, and yet my masculinity has always felt innate. Ordained as dyke, I play as both now. At times a corporeal compulsion and at others an exercise in theatre, I love playing dyke in this slavish gender playpen.

Halberstamn posits the butch as locked in a discordant embrace of hypervisibility and illegibility: “not male, not female, masculine but not female, female but not feminine … indefinable (and) unspeakable.” The camouflage of my fungus gnats amongst the soil had served them well. They had reproduced and bred without my noticing. Only in their masses had they become recognisable, and now they were not to be ignored. They have overwhelmed my house as they have overwhelmed my mind. I have decided to leave the fungus gnats alone. Perhaps out of evolved thinking but moreso out of conceded defeat. Instead, I water less now, move plants outside, give them some sun (less fungus, less gnats). Outside the gnats feast amongst their fellow muck-loving friends; isopods and soldier flies and worms and slugs. Each of them eating and shitting and becoming that which they love most — decay. Existences in perpetuity — death to life to death — reproduction, reproduction, reproduction. Digging into the soil all is revealed, an ecology of degeneration and regeneration. I wonder about the gender of the fungus, the compost, the decay that they munch upon. How does the sexing of these miniscule creators manifest in the lives spawned out of their non-human gendering?

I am a feaster as the fungus gnat is a feaster. We are beings of consumption. I am an imitator and a reproducer — everything that I have constructed is a delicately created recreation of all that is around. I flirt with gender and enjoy its spoils as much as I am constrained by it. I relish in the decay of traditions and binaries. I indulge it and I resist it. I taunt and I tease. I submit and I dominate. I give up to it and into it. I love it. We, the fungus gnats and I, live amongst the decay. They fuck in the soil and I fuck in the sacristy between how I feel and how I am. I play as boy and I play as girl but I’ll never be anything other than dyke.