Biopossibility: Molecular Monogamy and Audre Lorde’s Erotic

This chapter builds on the “dyke ethics” developed in the previous chapter in a speculative exploration of the uses of a materialism grounded in the epistemological interventions of feminist and postcolonial science studies and queer historizations of sexuality. As such, it offers a creative approach to the materiality of embodiment that is critically alert to the ways in which certain disciplinary ways of knowing have been constructed as less mediated access to that materiality than others. In a revaluation of marginalized body-knowledges, it reads Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as a biology of the erotic to decenter assumptions about sexuality and human nature that shape the field of gene-brain-behavior research on affiliative behavior in general and on monogamy in particular. Through this reading the chapter elaborates a theory of “biopossibility”—the complexly mediated capacity to embody certain socially salient traits and “differences.”