Eco-immunology and Superweeds

Abstract

This article explores immunity outside the contours of a human body and biopolitical framework in the plant science material-discursive object of the superweed with its resistance and tolerance to herbicides. Instead of categorically assuming all forms of immunity and immune systems taking place within the abstract category of the (human) body, the article attends to how the figure of the superweed as an analytical and synthesizing focal point comes to populate and be populated by the concept of immunity. At large, the author claims that the material dimension of the superweed can be seen as an extension or supplement to notions of the individual, autonomous, and bounded human body, yet this material dimension can also come to undermine even its own subject position. By unshackling or unlocking the concept of immunity from its human body ‘point of origin’, new ontological grounds for human and non-human political ecologies can be imagined, with a different form of embodiment, which is neither negative, nor affirmative.