Kimmerer builds a playfully gendered social frame to make species distinctions memorable

Evidence

What luxury, to come to work in order to play. The rain streams down the windows of the lab and the voices of the Sisters are my only company. I can laugh out loud with them, and who will notice? There are no students, no phone calls, just some handfuls of moss and a few hours stolen from the normal hubbub of a weekend. Dicranum is a genus of moss with many species, sisters in the same family. I think of them as only females, since the menfolk have met an unusual, and perhaps fitting, fate which strong women will understand immediately. We’ll get to that later. While the Sisters trade stories of the vulnerability that comes with a new hairstyle, the exposure of a tentative self, I’m laughing at how I’d never noticed before that the Dicranum s, more than any other moss, look like hair, combed hair, neatly parted and swept to one side. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Ch5’s point that precise vocabulary makes fine distinctions visible is here made memorable through storytelling, echoing the observation-as-method thread of this course. — connects to: Kimmerer frames annual spring breeding as one shared sacred longing across species — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 135; Nature’s kinship is affirmed in difference, not only by mirroring the self — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 508
• DEFINE: Dicranum identity is taught by contiguity to hair forms — naming via felt, visual analogy rather than abstract terms.

Broader Connections

• Nature’s kinship is affirmed in difference, not only by mirroring the self #expands (0.75) — Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, 508