This correlates with Sarah Ahmed' feminist killjoy, the homework to unlearn everything, including the sciences; this is the works of becoming a feminist (Ahmed 2016).

I came back to this after reading the disability and paragraph and the authors' prospective at the end. I realize that scientists like this are ignorant on understanding plants. He clearly lacked the initiative to study plants and instead plastered his perception of plants based on societal expectations.

I notice a common pattern from sex to disability, where plants are always humanized when being studied.

How can we correlate ableism to plants?

I was always very confused about this as well. How do plants and animals without mammal genital get involved in "sex"? Why is their reproduction always sexualized?

This reminds me of an aspect of eco-fascism where living things are priortized over human beings. This becomes racialized when Global South countries are judged for poor environmental practices. https://earthworks.org/blog/eco-fascism-a-tangible-present-danger/

This reminds me of the invasive species of the European Pine trees placed in Palestine during the Nakba. The Israeli forces planted pine trees while occupying Palestinian villages to replicate the European infrastructures, this is a biological warfare of colonialism (Josephson 2025). https://origins.osu.edu/read/environmental-nakba-israel-palestine-water

With the rise of anti-South Asian sentiment, South Asian countries are posted on social media with negative criticism of the polluted rivers, and littered streets; media consumers use this as an excuse to dehumanize South Asian people. But South Asian countries are lack the studies and sources for environmental work, as well as the politics involved, lobbyed by the BJP right wing Indian party and the Trump administration.

The author explains that botany has only been properly studied at Europe and North American institutions, compared to the rest of the world such as Africa and Asia where specimens are barely discovered.

Banu's introduction is very metaphorical to the term Labyrinth, making her book very enaging for readers, especially non-stem students like myself.

Science is often very exclusive to stem students, or its western epistemologies as Harding explains is only comprehensible from a anglo saxon male perspective. Banu encurages botany to be accessible to everyone, making learning and findings unlimted, and creating that change of feminist science.

Banu reassures to her readers that botany and this book is for everyone to read, which is why she is inclusive with these scientific terms.

This challenges Linnaeus notion of the male and female genitalia of plants, and his concept and time of the sex reproduction of plants correlating with the nuclear family tradition. If scientists like Linnaeus could not comprehend the difference of time with the growth of plants, they would be labeled as weird, or the way human beings are labelled, "queer", a term now reclaimed by the queer community.

I appreciate how Banu correlates the growth and sciences of a plant to queer theory. She pulls apart the definition of queer as not only a homosexual term but something does not align the strict labels and frameworks that human beings apply. She explains in a way that nature and plants are queer in itself if humans wanted to label it.

The author explains decolonization to not be a simple process, and they previously mention how colonization was a huge project. For that reason, we need to approach colonization with variaety of other resources also affected, creating a bigger alternative project.

This is the author's thesis to challenging the colonial science and overturning it with feminist science and botany.

This reminds me of a conversation I had in my sociology class about hate crime and racial discrimination in the healthcare systems. How the demographics of nurses are BIPOC and women, and have faced tremendous racism and sexism at workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic.

How the colonial mindset truly affected the kinship and families in South Asia, leaving countries like India truly displaced and underesourced. How this broke families apart by not believing in disabilities and making children feel less valuable in a competitized society, catching up to the first world countries.

These are the multitude of genres the author speaks on, to taking epistemology at a radical stance.

The author encourages to expand epistemology across variety of metholodologies to find more findings, implications and overall increase the studies of the botany field.

The author challenges Linnaeus concept of labeling human beings and living things from a negative perception, the way that hethinks. Lorde is used here to explain that studying plants can involve celebrating their differences.

The author answers their question so beautifully at the very end of this paragraph. Instead decentering the human out of plants, the author visualized a space where humans, living things and plants exist without a hierarchy, an eco-cosmipolitanism, the idea that all humans, animals, and living things are members of a single community.

In what way nature is considered feminine as mother nature? What are "the maternal instincts" of nature that are constructed by the patriarchy to call something mother nature?

This is the kind of feminist epistemology that Hardings encourages in her reading about the feminist research method.

I find it quite pathetic how easily people sexualize objects and living things and I cannot understand how that works, but I see the influence of scientists like Linnaeus encouraging this type of objectification in scientific studies. This reminds me of Paasnonen's concept of objectification, where people and things simply exist to be objectified, and that is due to the cultural dynamics and social constructions of a society.

The author beings with a strong evidence of the sexism uprooted in the plant biology of the classification of species. This correlates with Mulvey's concept of phallocentrism, where the attraction of a woman is centred by the male genital. In the sense of this reading. Linnaeus has labeled plants based on human anatomy, aligned with social contructions of rigid gender roles.

The author's main point of this chapter and this book is to highlight the colonial epistemology and influence on plant biology and how it lacks accuracy on the study of plants. The author recommends different epistemologies, especially the field of botany and how it is beneficial for the study of plants, also encouraging social justice. (p.1-2).