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Paper long abstract

I will be presenting my PhD dissertation on the narrative moment at which humans turn plant in contemporary coming-of-age stories.

Instead of growing up in their environment, young adults that turn plant choose to grow with their surroundings: (be)coming of plant thus presents another mode of becoming, an alternative coming of age. This inter-species transition blurs traditional boundaries separating humans from plants, which in turn allows these humans coming of age to engage in a life of entangled symbiopoiesis with their surroundings. Although their hybrid futures remain unwritten in any past, their new-found vegetality allows for multiple potential futures to be imagined simultaneously, grounding them in the present. A (be)coming of plant thus proposes a new coming of age, one that is not limited to the conventional ways, or indeed temporalities, of growing (up).

My dissertation project approaches this phenomenon of popular culture from a queer studies perspective, specifically examining the temporal change(s) that accompany such a taxonomical transition, and how this in turn affects the narratives of such examples at large. Narratives on humans turning plant thus provide insight into how the two can relate, which especially concerns our current understanding of how we may shape our entangled future(s) together.