Towards a radical insect erotics

All images are taken from ‘The Third Wife,’ (dir. Ash Mayfair, 2018)

I. dissipation

First, digestion. For weeks, they have slept in the fabric of their own unmaking, the marrow of a life lost to dream churning flesh into matter for new-old anatomy. Cells divide into multiples, premonition made granular, and growths reform into bold appendages. Now, no tiny limbs grasping for sustenance. Now, no shiny nose; no mouth wide, shut, then wide, shut. Now. Two scaly wings of chitin. Feather-like, stemmed antennae. Soft, scent-sensitive skin. Twitches.

Once a worm, here a moth. They burn a moon-shaped hole out of their cocoon and in this holy form they forge a bridge between the two countries, the countless lives – between the catalyst of desire and the body of culmination. With this, proteinaceous exquisite, they emerge. 

Luminous and breathable, silk catches the light, so supple it slips through your fingers. Like water or a breeze on the back of your neck on the hottest day of the year. I have a lot of silk. I’ve always loved the way it feels and how it sits on my body. For me, silk is an emotional textile, saturated with meaning and story. Secondhand, it’s an affordable luxury – a small, tactile pleasure in a world of capitalist dissociation and financial precarity, woven with ancestral wisdom and femininity on my own terms. On a much broader scale, across centuries, states, and species boundaries, silk symbolises a shared, multispecies journey of bodily labour. Sericulture, the raising of silkworms, is the interface between worm and woman, having long been considered “women’s work.”

The process is tricky – silkworms must be tended to with diligence. Before hatching, there are accounts of women stitching eggs into bags to wear beneath their clothing, their warm bodies readying the worms-to-be for life. Then, once born, each worm is no bigger than an eyelash. They are monophagous, meaning they prefer to feed on one food. In this case: white mulberry leaves. Drawn to the scent of jasmine, the worms are rewarded with a meal rich in moisture, protein, and carbohydrates. In these earliest, delicate days, they must be fed with only the most tender leaves, each individually hand-picked and then chopped into squares. The humidity of the silkworms’ habitat, a piled circle of mulberry, must also be just so, carefully controlled with dampened newspaper, covered and uncovered from day to night. 

As the worms grow, so too does the size of their meal-home. When they turn into milky-white grubs big enough to fit 2 or 3 in the palm of your hand, the worms move outside into long, makeshift pens. Here, farmer humans will stack yet more mulberry, using the rougher, tougher bottom leaves this time and even some of the hard, fibrous stalks. The worms' appetites, voracious, must be met. By this point, they have gone through several weeks of eating, sleeping, and shedding, awakening each time to new, bigger forms. It’s not that appetite precedes metamorphosis, but that change arrives through hunger.

At last, when the worms are sated, their movements become slow and languid. They make one final excretion, amber-green on their white-sheer skin, before crawling towards wooden frames – long, gridded blocks with tens upon tens of cubbies. Then, in their own private nook, each worm spins their body into the heart of a silk cocoon. Soft site of transformation. A single, continuous thread of silk. The frames will be hoisted up on pulleys and rotate on their own, pushed around by the weight of their inhabitants. In a couple of weeks, these once-worms will become fully-grown silkmoths. 

Except they don’t. To maintain the quality of the silk, the cocoon’s inhabitant-creator worm-moth is boiled alive and picked out. Their metamorphosis is left unfulfilled, discarded like their bodies – unless they are eaten. The pupae are a delicacy in many countries, blanched then fried in spices until crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. Nutty, rich, and salty, they are medicinal in Iran, Vietnam, and China, a neutral healer with nourishing properties similar to ginseng.

I wonder how much silkworms know of their latent potential. Is there something within them, some kind of expectation, that propels them to cocoon? That speaks to them of a world where their crawling bodies will somehow take flight? Might this knowing be a gut feeling, a prophecy of sorts, not unlike the prayers that spill and pour from the most devout? As long and as far as we can trust the rhythms of rebirth, the divine can be found everywhere: the hands of a lover, the wag of a tail, heat shimmers on tarmac in the middle of July. A worm is a worm, without feeling, without wanting, or so the story goes. But what if worms did want? What if worms had desire?

II. eclosion

When the moth is at last free, they search for the brightest light in the sky and ascend. The future of the past is now embodied in a strange, exhilarating present. (((All-at-once.))) A present where wanting, porous presence and odorous absence, has been rearranged from the inside-out. 

….Tree subsumes leaf subsumes worm…. 

……Body-full, delicious breath……

………..Blue-fizzing hum of electricity……………

……………..Rain creaks into the dark of the earth……………..

…………………Rich, crumble, honey, loam.……………

What came before is increasingly lost. (((Fading, abstraction, hush, and the recess of memory.))) In its place, incessant, is the jouissance of flight. 

And then, and then, alive, the air pulsates with the scent of another. Now.

Adult silkmoths have no way of eating or drinking. They live very brief lives by human standards, dying in less than a week, and in this fleeting period they spend their days mating. Some would read this and say that silkmoths live to “reproduce.” I prefer to say that silkmoths live to fuck. Many meanings dance. To “fuck like an animal” means to fuck like a nonhuman mammal which is, as Myriam Bahaffou explains: ‘A mechanical, non-conscious form of mating, performed without shame or sacredness; in other words, a savage act.’ 

Sexual hierarchies work in tandem with the often Western philosophical scales of being – conceptual arrangements of life, often hierarchical, that have had long-lasting repercussions on global culture and politics. In most of these scales, those perceived to be the “most human” (white, cisheterosexual, able-bodied, cerebral) are placed at the top of the ladder, and those thought to be “less human” (marginalised people, nonhuman animals, plants and fungi, minerals) are arranged in descending order towards the bottom. In this worldview, mammals and certain groups of humans are seen to (again, Bahaffou): 

Dehumanising sexualisation has long been used as a tool to police and control certain bodies. To be rendered animal is to be rendered unconscious – an object, not a subject, able to be exploited, sold, and/or disposed of. The “wild,” the Black and brown, the queer, the animal, are seen as unthinking and uncivilised, unable to control their biological whims. Further still, non-mammallian animals like fishes and insects are considered “lower” than mammals, and thus thought incapable even of having whims. 

Most people think of insects as “unintelligent” and lacking intention. Supposedly, insects don’t experience pain or emotion, and they certainly don’t experience pleasure or – god forbid – passion. But some worms do in fact experience pain and fear, and many, many animals - from crocodiles to bees - can and must play – which is another way of saying that many, many animals can and must feel joy, and are driven, desirous, to seek joy out. A wariness of anthropomorphism is not without its uses, but it has often occluded understanding of the beyond-human, and the ties between Western science and colonial conquest should not be understated. Expanding the conceptualisation of intelligence beyond complex brains opens us to unseen forms of intelligence - to “new” ways of speaking and feeling. So what if, rather than a preprogrammed instinct for species survival, silkmoths were motivated by their own individual wants? By yearning? By horniness? By a desire to fuck?

III. love’s lure

 Alluring. Pheromone.

Tentacles.     Secretion.

Wings. Trust. 

     Close.  

adrienne maree brown writes: “Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous; it is freedom.” Elsewhere, Xuanlin Tham pinpoints desire, that thrust towards pleasure, as an impulse with revolutionary potential as a creative force with the ability to return us to our bodies. Of course, both of these writers are in dialogue with Audre Lorde, whose essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’ remains the touchstone text. She writes:

Here, the erotic is found in sex, yes, but it’s primarily found in connection, intimacy, sensation, and emotion. In feeling. The erotic is the cold-icy-sweet of an ice cream, dancing all night until your heels blister, getting caught in the sudden, shrieking drench of a summer rain. It’s the difference between the dissociated fucking common to modern dating culture, and an embodied fucking where sex is a sacred expression of a love for life. It’s, as Lorde describes, the soft burst of yellow kneaded into a block of clear margarine, suffusing everything with colour. 

Spiritual, immanent, the erotic is a force capable of crumbling systems. Why? Because the erotic is the bridge to our deepest desires and our truest emotions. In other words, the erotic (again, not only sexual) is our ability to choose, to want, and to seek. It forms the basis of our agency and, in this, the erotic is the very thing that makes us alive.  

A radical insect erotics is the practice of opening ourselves to aliveness through an interspecies reframing of desire and embodiment. It’s getting horizontal for multispecies horizontalism. It’s making soil sexy. An invitation is embedded within the recognition of silkmoth desire. It asks: can we recognise that joy, creativity, imagination, desire, intention, play, fucking, making love, are not shameful, overindulgent, unnecessary, irrelevant, or merely “a tool to advance the species,” but the expression of two essential truths:

• Living is meant to be more than survival

• No-one and nothing on this planet was born to suffer

“Pleasure is the point.”

What would the world look like if we went all the way down on hierarchies of sex and life to uproot them, tearing them out tooth and nail from the ground-up? How would things be different if the agency of every living being – even that of insects – was taken seriously? If embodied joy, healthy pleasure, and the sacred erotic were enabled to flourish? 

IV. endnotes

The worms that never become moths don’t escape me. The reality is that we live in a time of intense violence, of genocide, unspeakable trauma, multiple colonial climate crises, and AI tech-lord takeovers, where people, animals, plants, rivers, and so on are robbed of safety, dignity, and all other necessary foundations for good, lively lives. Because of this, to avoid succumbing to overwhelm and passivity, we need the erotic now more than ever.

In Ash Mayfair’s film ‘The Third Wife,’ between shots of writhing silkworms and rural 19th century Vietnam, we catch glimpses of the beautiful 2nd wife Xuân through the eyes of teen third wife Mây. Like the slow-blooming growth of the silkworms and their halted metamorphoses, Mây’s marriage into the sericulture family is tentative at first, sometimes violent, often tender and sweet, and ultimately ends in tragedy. Mây is never allowed to embody her full self, trapped as she is by the parameters of her world, and yet, there is a glimmer of hope. 

In its depiction of a world that denies safety and fulfilment, Mây and the other characters still carve out moments of pleasure. Xuân fucks her lover in the lush green of a bamboo forest. Mây plays with the other children and giggles with the other wives. Then, at the very end, one of Xuân’s daughters, who had previously expressed a desire to become a man, takes a pair of scissors to their hair, black strands falling into water. Triumphant. If grief is a certainty, so too is joy. If violence is a fact, so too is resistance. The past is the past, the present is the present, and the future is yet to be made. 

We, like silkworms, possess the innate power to change the shapes of our lives and worlds. Do we cut ourselves off from the feelings necessary for this change? Or do we follow the arrow of eros, soaring as it does towards a horizon always out of reach, but never too far away?

V. anew