Seed: Gendered Vernaculars and Relational Possibilities

This contribution to feminist vocabulary provides a genealogy of the term seed. We both work on practices of care and control related to seeds, from seed banking and agricultural development projects to everyday practices of keeping, saving, and tinkering with seeds. As a term, seed evokes gendered ideas about human reproduction that center masculinity and virility, even though the botanical seeds are in fact already-fertilized embryos. This entry takes up the gendered dimension of seeds (and the elisions it produces) as a lens to interrogate ideas of use, usefulness, and uselessness (Ahmed 2019) in the world of biodiversity banking and plant genetic resources. With examples from seed banking and farming in West Africa, and with inspiration from feminist philosophers and anthropologists Sylvia Wynter, Marilyn Strathern, and Sara Ahmed, this provocation contributes to the vocabularies of feminist anthropology and science studies. Since the stories we tell about the world are filled with metaphor, why not complicate the vernacular understanding and usage of seed to reflect the queer and matrilineal possibilities that we see all around us, instead of the potent patrilineality that remains as a vestigial reminder of the values we would rather leave behind?