3 Sexing Botanical

“When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?
”: Grafting, Exoticism, and Pleasure Gardens in Jeanette

Winterson's The PowerBook
Author(s): Susan Pelle
Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (2012), pp. 31-52
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5250/fronjwomestud.33.3.0031
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“When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?”1
Grafting, Exoticism, and Pleasure Gardens in
Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook
susan pelle
It was on the cherry that I first learned the art of grafting and wondered
whether it was an art I might apply to myself.
Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
There are many legends of men being turned into beasts and women into
trees, but none I think, till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of
a little horticultural grafting.
Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook
Jeanette Winterson’s 2001 The PowerBook is, in part, a fictional tale of bod-
ies and pleasures and an imaginative journey through cyberspace where char-
acters exist both within and outside of history. Because the narrator Ali/x, a
“language costumier,” utilizes the momentary and imaginative possibilities of
virtual reality, she is able to transport herself and the object of her affection,
Tulip, through time and space as she promises, “this is an invented world. You
can be free just for one night. Undress. Take off your clothes. Take off your
body. Hang them up behind the door. Tonight we can go deeper than dis-
guise.”2 In an attempt to seduce Tulip, Ali/x composes sexy and imaginative
online narratives where the two are able to experience and express their unre-
alized passions. In one such playful narrative, because “a theft lies behind the
rise of the tulip in Holland,”3 Ali/x takes advantage of the unarticulated spaces
between fact and fiction and strategically inserts Ali, a queer working-class
Turkish figure referred to as “the exotic of the East,”4 into the very real histori-
cal accounts of tulipomania in Europe (1636–37).
“Ali tells stories. He puts himself in the stories. Once there, he cannot easily
get out again. . . . Ali’s story is not well documented.”5 As theorists we must be-
gin with the stories that are silenced or simply not recognized, suggests Judith
Pelle: Grafting and Pleasure Gardens in PowerBook 31
Halberstam. Halberstam asserts that we have perfected the ability to critique
the concept of normativity, but we have fallen short “at describing in rich de-
tail the practices and structures that both oppose and sustain conventional
forms of association, belonging, and identification.”6 When Ali’s tale opens in
1591, she has been appointed by Constantinople’s Sulyman the Magnificent to
carry and present the first tulip to the people of Holland.7 As a way to secre-
tively and successfully transport this coveted flower across geographical bor-
ders, and as a “natural” complement to her gendered performance of an alter-
native masculinity, Ali cleverly “straps on” a tulip and two bulbs. As the tulip,
also referred to as “the exotic of the East,” is grafted onto Ali’s body, the sexed,
sexual, and raced categories determining who can be recognized as normal,
natural, and even human are questioned, challenged, and disrupted.8 As Win-
terson reappropriates the figure of the Other as a site of possibility and ex-
pands upon the trope of grafting introduced in her 1989 Sexing the Cherry, she
simultaneously challenges Western stereotypes surrounding the Middle East-
ern Other as well as Western identity categories that appear eternally fixed.
Ali’s ability to transform and escape categorization is enough to disturb the
“natural” order of things, but it is also her/his foreign, working-class, and ex-
otic brown body that initiates “trouble.”9 In the end Ali fails to deliver her/his
tulip and bulbs to their assigned destination and instead cultivates an unsanc-
tioned tulip-filled pleasure garden that is specifically about the proliferation
of pleasure: Ali “bought a piece of land by the river and planted a pleasure
garden for the ladies of Holland.”10 The community’s attraction to the sexual,
erotic, and exotic space of the garden allows for the creation of a communal
pleasure garden—an ars erotica—that moves sex, race, and sexuality into the
public sphere.11 The celebration, pleasure, and variation discovered and ex-
changed in Ali’s garden are not about discovering a “true” self; instead they
are about intensity, proliferation, and refusing identification as a specific sex-
ualized being. As the surrounding community takes part in strapping on the
tulip, variation is acknowledged and pleasure spreads. Thus, Ali and the tulip’s
dislocation and transplantation elucidate the promise and threat not only of
queer sexual relations but also of cross-class and cross-racial pleasures.
horticultural and corporeal grafting

Winterson’s The PowerBook and Sexing the Cherry address themes of ro-
mance, cliché, passion, language, imagination, storytelling, and identity, and
their overlapping narratives span various geographies and time periods. Both
novels tell fantastical tales of imperialist travels; colonial contact with the
Other; the (re)discovery and appropriation of exotic plants, fruits, and other
32 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 3
various commodities; and the politics of horticultural and corporeal grafting,
which is defined in Sexing the Cherry as the coming together of two distinct
parts “so that the two take advantage of each other and produce a third kind,
without seed or parent.”12 In Sexing the Cherry Jordon, the adopted son of
Dog Woman and one of the protagonists of the seventeenth-century narra-
tive, encounters explorer and “Gardener to the King,” John Tradescant, and
begins his own experimentations in grafting.13
Jordan soon becomes Tradescant’s apprentice, and it is during these early
years that Jordan hopes to become someone more like his mentor: an ex-
plorer, a world traveler, and someone “better and stronger.”14 As a young man
who is freely able travel the world, Jordan does succeed in (re)discovering ex-
otic curiosities and transports the first pineapple from Barbados to England
in 1661.15 Amid cultural, religious, and political controversy, Jordan also suc-
cessfully grafts a Polstead black cherry onto a Morello cherry, creating “a third
kind.”16 Soon, though, his experiments in horticultural grafting shift into fan-
tasies of corporeal grafting. Jordan ponders if applying this art to his own
body might allow him to “become someone else in time, grafted onto some-
thing better and stronger.”17 In fact, to become this someone else in time, Jor-
dan reveals, “What I would like is to have some of Tradescant grafted on to
me.”18 Regrettably, Jordan’s fantasy is never realized.
Whereas Jordan’s desire is only an act of imagination, The PowerBook
brings the fantasy of corporeal grafting to life. As Ali’s tale unfolds, we dis-
cover that she has always been a master of disguise. When Ali is born, her
father wants to drown her rather than feed another daughter; to avoid such
a terrifying fate, Ali’s mother begins dressing Ali as a boy with the hopes that
she might bring in additional income for the family. During this time the Ot-
toman Empire was economically and culturally thriving as Sulyman contin-
ued to conquer, claim, and colonize new territories. To supply his army and
expand his empire, Sulyman regularly traded “jewels” and “luxuries” with the
English; and because, accord to Anna Pavord, the Dutch’s love for tulips paral-
leled their “fascination with all things exotic,” Ali smuggles the first tulip from
Turkey to Holland.19
In the Netherlands, because the trading of tulips became synonymous with
the “vices” of gambling, rules and regulations began to surround this mar-
ket.20 Ali reveals her covert role as she asserts, “I became a spy. Sulyman him-
self appointed me.”21 Because Ali initially makes this journey for reasons of
economic survival, she maintains her “disguise” as a boy in order to travel
safely. As Ali acquires her tulip and tulip bulbs from the hills of Turkey, she
elaborates on the ability to transform nature’s wonder into a grafted bodily
wonder:
My mother got some stout thread and belted it through the natural die-
back of the bulb tops. Then she sewed the lot onto a narrow leather strap
and fastened it around my hips. . . . At home my mother embalmed the
tulip, and in a few days it was ready to wear. This was my centerpiece.
About eight inches long, plump, with a nice weight to it. We secured it
to my person and inspected the results. . . . There are many legends of
men being turned into beasts and women into trees, but none I think,
till now, of a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticul-
tural grafting.22
To be “a woman who becomes a man by means of a little horticultural graft-
ing” cannot be rationalized as a simple shift from one dominant sexed iden-
tity to the other. Instead, to place the gendered category of masculinity along-
side the sexed category of female is to create a nonnormative body that fails to
be fixed or contained as either male or female.
Although the tulip’s position in nature, alongside its delicate folds, gentle
scents, deep colors, and hidden depths, makes it an almost perfect metonym
for the vulva, in this “legend” it resists any sexed or sexual signification. As the
tulip becomes a part of Ali, not only can it be read as both an artificial and a
“natural” prosthesis, but it also transforms Ali into someone new. Just as Bente
Gade asserts that Winterson’s use of the trope of grafting in Sexing the Cherry
allows us to approach our own and others’ subjectivities as “unstable and con-
tradictory,” Laura Doan finds the promise of horticultural grafting to be its
ability to naturalize that which appears unnatural or abnormal: grafting “re-
verses, relativizes, and problematizes notions of normal and natural in order
to ‘naturalize’ cultural oddities, monstrosities, abnormalities, and conformi-
ties.”23 Instead of alluding to female sexual anatomy, then, Ali’s newly grafted
body disrupts any equivalence among flowers, female bodies, and a normative
femininity and instead illuminates the fluidity and instability of identity.
Like Ali the tulip too can be understood as a performer, a trickster, a
changeling, and, according to Pavord, “always trying on new clothes.”24 In
spite of the conventional belief that tulips are purely aesthetic, serving no sci-
entific, medical, or practical purpose at all—“The tulip is one of the most
extravagantly useless” flowers25—there must be more to the tulip than meets
the eye. It must be more than just a “pretty flower.” After all, during the height
of tulipomania people were assaulted and jailed over disputes surrounding
the tulip, and bulbs were traded for gold, land, businesses, and dowry.26 One
of the many wonders of the tulip is that it continually transforms, escapes
categorization, and resists any attempts to tame it. Describing the myster-
ies surrounding tulips, Pavord writes, “Even now, in their dark underground
grottoes beneath the rocks, the tulips were plotting new feats, re-inventing
themselves in ways that we could never dream.”27 During the beginning and
height of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century tulipomania, the time period of
Ali’s own adventures, the tulip was not only a coveted commodity but was
also revered as a sexy, ravishing, exotic, intense, fancy-free, brilliant, alluring,
wild, rebellious, and mysterious jewel.28 Not only was the tulip continually
modifying and regenerating itself, but it was also “subject to mutations that
produced spontaneous and wondrous changes in form and color.”29 The tulip
was also believed to be magical; it could show us a momentary glimpse of our
future(s) if we only looked and believed. In a way, then, the tulip can be de-
fined as a “queer” little flower.
By paying particular attention to the queer characteristics of the tulip as
well as to the limitations of normative identity categories, it becomes obvious
that Ali exists on a continuum of human variation and cannot be categorized
using Western terms. After being kidnapped and trafficked by pirates, Ali is
forced to become a sexual trainer to an Italian princess. “Trembling, hungry,
dirty and alone,” Ali contemplates her/his fate.30 As a woman her future is un-
known, but as a boy he has something to anticipate: “sexual congress” with a
princess.31 With initial reluctance that stems from a fear of being outed, Ali
realizes, “Come death, come life, there is a part to play and that is all,”32 and
she/he takes on this task and learns something new about power and plea-
sure. During their first night of sexual play Ali reveals, “I felt my disguise
come to life. The tulip began to stand. . . . Very gently the Princess lowered
herself across my knees and I felt the firm red head and pale shaft plant itself
in her body. A delicate green-tinted sap dribbled down her brown thighs. All
afternoon I fucked her.”33 Despite the possibilities that this fantastical erotic
exchange between Ali and the princess offers—the body is transformed, new
forms of pleasure are explored, and anatomy is disarticulated from a sexed,
gendered, and sexual identity—this is the moment that critics use to support
their categorization of Ali as a specific sexualized being.
tertium non data: the third is not given 34

Do attempts to categorize Ali based on her/his biological body rely solely on
anatomy as the signifier of identity? Or can sex, gender, and sexuality sim-
ply be strapped on and removed at will? A part of the confusion surrounding
Ali’s sexed, gendered, and sexual performance has to do with Winterson’s own
identity as a lesbian, as well as her interchangeable use of pronouns in The
PowerBook. In “Who Cares about Gender at a Time like This? Love, Sex, and
the Problem of Jeanette Winterson,” Jago Morrison distinguishes between the
writer and the “institution” known as “Jeanette Winterson.” He believes that
as readers we sometimes unconsciously place our own demands and desires
onto Winterson’s fiction.35 Even Winterson herself finds it frustrating when
critics attempt to identify her characters based on her own sexual identity as
a lesbian. Winterson writes, “I am a writer who happens to love women. I am
not a lesbian who happens to write.”36 But more important, the desire to at-
tach a particular sexual identity to Ali has everything to do with anatomy. For
example, when the princess sees Ali’s “treasure,” she responds, “‘I have never
seen a man before.’ (You’re not seeing one now.) ‘The stories I have heard . . .
the fleshiness, the swelling . . . but you are like a flower.’ (This was true).”37 Ali
is “like a flower,” and because the eight-inch-long plump tulip and the me-
ticulously constructed leather harness strapped around Ali’s hips pull from a
wide index of lesbian signifiers,38 one could erroneously isolate this moment
and define Ali as a lesbian.
Categories and concepts such as sex, gender, and sexuality are political
constructs, and any system of human classification and interpretation can
have devastating effects on an individual’s quality of life. Because of Ali’s per-
formance of an alternative masculinity, a performance that is accentuated by a
“strap-on,” literary critics often define her/him as a crossdresser or a lesbian.39
Even Tulip, the woman who receives the playful and sexy online story of Ali’s
encounter with the princess, has concerns and demands to know if Ali/x (the
narrator) is male or female. In Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue Les Fein-
berg identifies “the problem” with rigid identity categories: “The problem is
that they are trying to understand my gender expression by determining my
sex—and therein lies the rub!”40 In an attempt to move beyond these miscon-
ceptions Patrick Califia, a self-identified transgender female-to-male, includes
an honest and clever diatribe in Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer
Sex entitled “Fifteen Responses for Rejecting my Dick (and My Responses)”
that playfully encourages us to question corporeal categories that initially
seem “natural” and “fixed.” In this exploration Califia’s “dick” is at once a
dildo, an enlarged clitoris, fingers, and fist.41 This (dis)articulation and (dis)
organization radically alter the notion of a fixed body, what this body can do,
and how it can experience pleasure, whether or not this is the result of testos-
terone where the clitoris grows significantly in size, a strap-on, a disregard for
genital orifices altogether, a radical refiguring of what genitals are, can do, and
are called, or genital surgery, to name but a few examples.
Califia believes that if we can approach the pleasures and possibilities of
transitioning by responding to the body as a text that can be forever rewrit-
ten, then we can begin to combat the negative or monstrous connotations em-
bedded within medical and mainstream discourses that approach the volun-
tary modification of one’s body as sick and unhealthy. Further, by approaching
bodies as categories that are fleeting, fictional, transformative, unstable, and
elusive, the notion of who counts as worthwhile and valuable can be altered. In
captivating ways the disparate, contradictory, and failed attempts to categorize
Ali actually illustrate the mutability of identity. In contrast to a politics that
fixes the category of “woman” to an “appropriately” sexed body, Winterson
participates in a queering of the body as she imaginatively expands the bound-
aries determining who can be recognized and respected as a human being.
As both Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook reveal that through acts of
fantasy we can actually imagine and live a different kind of life, becoming
“someone else in time, grafted onto something better and stronger,”42 they si-
multaneously reconfigure dominant constructions of the human. One mis-
guided critique directed toward Winterson’s fiction is that it wanders too far
into imagination and neglects actual lived realities and bodies: “Where is the
body?” asks Ulf Cronquist.43 As The PowerBook is celebrated for its “repudia-
tion of master narratives” and its “shamelessness and obscenity,” it is also re-
buked as monstrous and irresponsible.44 Even Tulip, the woman who is trans-
formed into a “flower-fucking Princess,” is often shocked by the “shameless and
obscene” content of Ali/x’s imaginative online narratives: “That was a terrible
thing to do to a flower.”45 Furthermore, while Jeffrey Roessner asserts that Win-
terson’s Sexing the Cherry possesses a “persistent drive to transcend the flesh,”
Cronquist is adamant that the utopic space envisioned in The PowerBook “de-
nies access to the body and therefore her novel denies access to freedom.”46
Countering the argument that Winterson’s legend neglects “real” bodies
and lives are the various concepts of grafting used by transgender and queer
theorists. As Jean Bobby Noble defines the process of grafting on the trans-
gender and/or transsexual body as a “vital or indissoluble union” between two
things, as well as a “self-remaking and queer reproduction outside of a hetero-
normative model,” Madelyn Detloff highlights the vital political connections
between imagining the process of corporeal grafting and carving out a more
livable life: “Imagining different interfaces between the body and the world
can inspire the creation of adaptive technologies and techniques (from pros-
thetics, to screen-readers, to drug cocktails, to surgeries) that open up more
livable options for different and differently-abled bodies.”47
Despite the intimate connections between acts of imagination and political
change, many continue to approach horticultural grafting as “doing violence”
to nature; as a result its reappropriation in the transgender community is of-
ten read by mainstream society as “doing violence” to a “natural” body. What
grafting leaves us with, according to modern-day science, are bastard children
“without seed or parent,” freaks of nature, “abnormalities” and “monstrosi-
ties.” Even Dog Woman in Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry surprisingly opposes
Jordan’s explorations in grafting: “‘Thou mayest as well try to make a union
between thyself and me by sewing us at the hip,’ and then, ‘Of what sex is that
monster you are making?’ . . . She said such things had no gender and were a
confusion to themselves.”48 Not only is the hybrid cherry an abomination, ac-
cording to Dog Woman, but also it will never be recognized or understood by
society or itself.
Akin to Jordan’s monstrous cherry, Ali, with a newly grafted and rebellious
body, is a “freak,” a cultural oddity, according to mainstream society; she/he is
both out of place and out of time. Yet queer theory and Califia’s mischievous
rant, alongside the reappropriation of the trope of grafting, depathologize
body modifications and encourage us to ask different questions.
Instead of pinpointing moments in The PowerBook that will allow us to mi-
raculously “fix” Ali in time and space, can we revel in uncertainty and trans-
formation? Responding to Tulip’s questions of gender, Ali/x asserts: “‘Does it
matter?’ ‘It’s a co-ordinate.’ ‘This is a virtual world.’ ‘OK, OK—but just for the
record—male or female?’ ‘Ask the Princess.’ ‘That was just a story.’ ‘This is just
a story.’”49 As Ali/x (re)creates narratives, bodies, and scenarios online, and as
Ali/x and Tulip interact through email exchanges, real and imaginary worlds
momentarily merge, as do bodies and discourses. And through the articulated
pleasures that Ali and the princess exchange, the exchange of exotic bodies
and commodities across geographical borders, the reimagining of history, and
the liminal space that Ali now inhabits because of her/his bodily transforma-
tion, The PowerBook can be approached as a fantastical text that opens up real
possibilities. After all, who we are, how we imagine ourselves, and who we
might become are intertwined and mutually dependent upon the fantasies we
are told and able to imagine and embody.
the exotic of the east

Ironically, in 1559 there was much to celebrate about bodies and flowers. Dur-
ing this time Italian anatomist Renaldus Columbus (re)discovered the clitoris,
and the first tulip “definitely known to have flowered in the Europe” broke
ground.50 Yet the ideological thread binding together botany, anatomy, and
an innate character has an unsavory cultural history. Grace Kyungwon Hong
states that natural history was not “a monolithic or uncontradictory dis-
course, but one that unevenly mediated the anxieties of the era.”51 The inter-
secting languages of natural history and comparative anatomy as well as the
taxonomical system of classifying plants were the beginning of discursively
representing and constructing Western unease surrounding the presence of
queer and raced bodies. Despite taxonomy’s “imperfections” the classification
and categorization of plant life offered a language with which the West could
“scientifically” and “accurately” read and interpret its Others.
In an attempt to reify the belief that there is a “natural” order to the world,
Carolus Clusius, director of the Garden of Leiden, developed a system of clas-
sification and evaluation for the flower.52 Building upon Clusius’s knowledge
and status, Carl Linnaeus penned Systema Naturae and fine-tuned the meth-
ods of plant classification that were begun by Clusius.53 Linnaeus asserted that
a plant’s “class” could be determined by the presence or absence of “male”
and/or “female” sex organs: the stamen and the pistil.54 Although plant life
and human beings were and continue to be simultaneously ordered and clas-
sified based on biology and sexual anatomy, this rigid system of categoriz-
ing one’s supposed inherent identity has been resisted by humans and flowers
alike. It can be acknowledged, then, that as the flower and Ali rebelled against
any attempts at categorization, a political space of uncertainty was opened up.
Ali’s ability to escape sex, gender, and sexual categorization is enough to
cause uncertainty, but it is also her/his racial identity that shapes how Ali is
interpreted. To inhabit a queer and raced body is doubly dangerous because
both categories are constructed and connected through the ideological con-
cepts of excess, perversion, and pathology.55 Just as genderqueer, transgender,
and transsexual bodies have been read as unnatural and abnormal, there has
been a long history of appropriating the Middle Eastern figure only to then
pathologize him or her. Not only is the Middle Eastern “exotic” female dually
constructed as repressed and oppressed and as excessive and hypersexual, but,
according to Marjorie Garber in “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism, Transsex-
ualism and the Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” the male is feminized and
associated with “sexual deviance, and particularly with male homosexuality.”56
In his infamous 1886 introduction to and translation of A Thousand Nights
and a Night, Richard Burton identifies “The Sotadic Zone” as specific geo-
graphical locations that are filled with “perversions,” perversions those of
us in the West “look upon . . . with lively disgust.”57 Africa, Morocco, Egypt,
China, Japan, and Turkey, to name but a few specifics, make Burton’s list
of countries and continents inhabited by people who are unafraid and un-
ashamed to experience perverse pleasures.58 Burton defines and pathologizes
“sotadic love” as “a blending of the masculine and feminine temperaments.
. . . Hence the male féminisme [femininity] whereby the man becomes patiens
[passive] as well as agens [active], and the woman a tribade, a votary of mas-
cula [man-like] Sappho.”59 Burton not only pathologizes nonnormative gen-
ders and sexualities, but he also weds these “perversions” to race. Further, as
his own theories were informed by existing stereotypes of the exotic and per-
verse Middle Eastern figure, his construction of the Sotadic Zone continues to
reify and perpetuate them.60
Winterson’s strategic use of existing stereotypes in The PowerBook reveals
the intimate connections between self and Other while also emphasizing the
complex workings of power. Using the Other to make sense of the self is a
common ethnocentric practice. Siobhan Somerville warns that concepts and
categories, such as those articulated by Burton, open up a dangerous space
where “uncivilized” sexual acts are pinned down and used as justification for
one’s innate inferiority.61 The result of such pathological constructions is that
Ali experiences new forms of violence because of her/his new body, body part,
and identity. After the tulip is secured as a “centerpiece,” Ali hitches a ride on
a spice ship. Forced to journey into unknown territory, Ali is dislocated and
awakened to a history of imperialism, exploitation, and war as she/he is told,
“To become that city, that civilisation, you once took a pickaxe and destroyed
what you hated, and what you hated was what you did not understand.”62 In
addition to this dislocation and awareness concerning violence between na-
tions, a pirate sexually assaults Ali.
As an “effeminate” young Turkish “boy,” Ali is aligned with otherness, and
it is this figure, according to Joseph A. Boone in “Vacation Cruises; or, The
Homoerotics of Orientalism,” who “represents one ‘face’ of orientalist homo-
erotic fantasy.”63 As a way to violently impose his own (phallic) power and
fulfill his own sexual fantasy of colonial contact, the pirate “pulled out his
own cock and held it under Ali’s nose. ‘This is treasure. You aren’t worth a
flea’s ransom.’ Ali sucked it. What else could he do?”64 Perceived as hypersex-
ual, shameless, and alluring with no inherent value, Ali is forced to navigate,
negotiate, and survive the damaging effects of these stereotypes. Through this
encounter not only does Winterson illustrate how stereotypes directly pro-
voke the psychic pain and sexual violence that Ali is subjected to, but she also
demonstrates exactly how Ali’s world travels are shaped by her/his identity as
queer working-class exotic Eastern Other.
the troubling of empire and paradise

Recorded history declares that through a combination of knowledge, power,
and secrecy, Clusius spurred on the passions of tulipomania as he transformed
the tulip into a much desired and glamorous commodity. Despite Clusius’s
celebrity status, the cultivation and trading of tulips in seventeenth-century
Holland was a covert operation. Because Clusius secluded himself and his tu-
lips, trading only with those he knew, the Garden of Leiden became some-
what of an exclusive and privileged gated community. Winterson intervenes
in this narrative; demotes Clusius; and assigns Ali the lead role as gardener,
grafter, and architect of the craze and pleasures of tulipomania. Ali refuses to
deliver her/his tulip and tulip bulbs to their assigned destination, the Garden
of Leiden,65 and instead cultivates an unsanctioned communal pleasure gar-
den. And if we reinterpret Ali’s newly transplanted flower garden, space, iden-
tity, and nation can be queered.
Both Lucile H. Brockway in Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of
the British Royal Botanic Gardens and Jill H. Casid in Sowing Empire: Land-
scape and Colonization read and interpret the personal and political signifi-
cance of European gardens and illustrate what it is that Ali must resist and
work against as she/he cultivates an unauthorized pleasure garden. While
Brockway details the economic purpose of European formal gardens, Casid
approaches these same gardens as “the primary means through which partic-
ular formations of family, nation, and colonial empire were engendered and
naturalized.”66 It is imperative to mention that there were “pleasure gardens”
in Constantinople beginning in the late fifteenth century, but, as Ali would
have known, these spaces too were reserved for the wealthy and privileged
only. Ali “whips a craving into a craze,” not through consumption, where the
tulip becomes merely a commodity, a symbol of one’s wealth and status or a
signifier of Empire, but through the transformation of bodies and pleasures
that spread throughout Ali’s community garden.
As the tulip is transplanted into the garden, it is no longer a commodity
that links family, nation, and class; instead it transforms bodies and pleasures
while simultaneously carving out an alternative public:
The uses found by the ladies of Holland for this amorous flower have
been kept a close secret. A Dutch lady, Mrs van der Pluijm, taught the
Earl of Hackney’s daughter how to best arrange her bulbs and stem
and the practice soon spread. Few men were aware of their wives’ and
daughters’ true passion for this Exotic of the East, and as men are apt to
try and please women, and love to gamble, it was easy enough to whip a
craving into a craze.67
As the erotic secrets of the “Exotic of the East” are passed from Ali to Mrs.
van der Pluijm to the Earl of Hackney’s daughter within this newly cultivated
space, once unimagined possibilities are made real. Ali’s expertise in the art of
corporeal grafting, alongside her/his encounters with the Captain from Istan-
bul, the pirates and princess from Genoa, and the ladies of Holland, illustrates
that although the tulip cannot be disconnected from colonial exploration, ex-
ploitation, and a desire for all things exotic, its displacement, journey, and dis-
persion across the globe are specifically about the spread of the community’s
bodies and pleasures.
If we trace the diasporic travels of the tulip, we get a sense of the vari-
ous cultures’ movements, transformations, and desires.68 In “New World Pas-
toral: The Caribbean Garden and Emplacement in Giséle Pineau and Shani
Mootoo,” the piece that inspired this essay, Sarah Phillips Casteel analyzes the
garden as a way to reconsider our understanding of space and place.69 Because
garden flowers have almost always been uprooted from one locale, exported,
and then transplanted into new soils (a colonial project of sorts), we might
read the tulip through the lens of perpetual displacement. However, Casteel
details that gardens can be read as spaces of rootedness and mobility. As a
result of the involuntary journey that both human beings and plant life often
make, the garden does not “celebrate placelessness,” suggests Casteel. Instead
it implies “the need to establish a sense of place in the face of the recognition
that no absolute stability is possible.”70 A part of the anxiety surrounding the
tulip concerns if and how this flower can fulfill individual and/or communal
pleasures and desires.
Pleasure is not necessarily understood as a “bad” thing in Western cul-
ture. In fact, human beings are encouraged to seek out (consume) pleasure
in our daily living. The problem arises and regulation occurs when unsanc-
tioned forms of pleasure are sought out and practiced, particularly when such
practices or modes of living move into the public sphere. There are numerous
parallels between the history of the tulip and the history of plants, trees, and
flowers that are believed to hold the key to a forbidden knowledge or pleasure.
Any flower, fruit, plant, or tree that poses “a threat to the smooth workings of
the social order” is soon to be outlawed.71 To eat of the fruit, or to indulge in
sex acts or even drug use that bring pleasure, often results in the outlawing of
that particular plant, flower, or act itself.
While many queer theorists have accurately detailed how zoning laws that
push out and shut down queer spaces have detrimentally affected queer cul-
ture,72 others have detailed, often simultaneously, the possibilities that are
opened up when queer spaces prosper. Sara Ahmed affirms that it is in the
coming together of queer bodies within public spaces where community is
formed and new pleasures are invented and explored.73 The promise of a
collective (sub)culture or alternative public, then, is that it offers up a space
where human beings might be listened to, recognized, accepted, and even em-
braced. As Ali, the tulip, and the surrounding community establish an eclec-
tic, unruly, and nonreproductive space of their own, they thrive.
ars erotica: variation and pleasure in the garden
In The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World Michael Pollan ar-
ticulates that human beings and tulips are, in fact, the same, that we share one
basic hidden desire: the desire to multiply, to reproduce. He writes, “all those
plants care about is what every being cares about on the most basic genetic
level: make more copies of itself.”74 Despite my agreement with Pollan’s sense
of ethics concerning the symbiotic and thoughtful relationship between hu-
man beings and the “natural” world, this particular analogy is problematic,
steeped in heteronormativity. Is reproduction/procreation really the deepest
longing of human beings and tulips alike? Is this what connects us, brings us
together, makes us the same? Winterson playfully counters such claims and
puts forward nonreproductive understandings of time and space as Ali brings
to life the hopes that are articulated in Sexing the Cherry and makes “a success
of the new fashion of grafting.”75
As Ali rebelliously breaks the rules and cultivates her/his own pleasure gar-
den, she/he emphasizes that variation and community are the necessary attri-
butes for living a pleasurable life:
When Ali unstrapped her bulbs and planted them in the good earth,
she was obeying the command of the scriptures to go forth and multi-
ply. Multiply she did—bulbs, balls, fortune and friends—for every lady
of fashion longed to walk in the gently nodding garden and lie under a
tree, where she could experience for herself those exquisite attributes of
variation that humans and tulips share.76
As the ladies of Holland are enticed by the garden, this sexualized space is
transformed into an ars erotica of sorts, a “nomadic garden of queer longing,”
or a “queer counterpublic.”77 The pleasures, enchantment, and variation real-
ized and exchanged in the garden are not about discovering a singular sexual
identity or a true sense of self; instead they are about intensity, proliferation,
and refusing identification as a specific sexualized being. Further, Ali and the
ladies of Holland are living beyond the bounds of “reproductive and family
time,” while simultaneously living “outside the logic of [labor, production,
and] capital accumulation.”78 As Ali “goes forth and multiplies,” she insists
that it is “variation” that all human beings share, not the desire to reproduce.
As a result Winterson creatively intervenes in history and disarticulates the
metaphoric connections between flowers and bodies and gardens and Empire.
Inevitably, though, any theoretical meandering in the garden brings up
questions of us and them, boundaries and borders, an inside and outside, and
acceptance and exclusion.79 When we first read through Winterson’s descrip-
tion of a pleasure garden that is cultivated specifically “for the ladies of Hol-
land,” there is a sense that it might be a “gated community,” an enclosed and
secretive space for women only, a “mock” harem, a space that offers a mo-
mentary escape from the workings of power, and/or an ars erotica of sorts. In
The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault defines ars erotica as an Eastern-only
pleasure that exists solely for pleasure’s sake and is opposed to Western cul-
ture’s scientia sexualis. While ars erotica is “evaluated in terms of its intensity,
its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body,” scientia sexu-
alis would have us believe that in seeking out and confessing the underlying
reasons for and truths behind our sexual desires, behaviors, and acts, we will
discover a once hidden truth about ourselves and therein become whole: “The
truth healed.”80 As the disclosure of our sexual practices promised to reveal
the secret of who we truly are, sex became the object of surveillance, interven-
tion, and management. In contrast to a pleasure that is informed and shaped
by institutionalized discourses on sex, prohibition, and knowledge-power, an-
other component of ars erotica is the elusive passage of erotic knowledge from
teacher to “disciples.”81
Although Foucault never fully denies that there has always been a subtle
form of ars erotica in the West, he has been accused of a form of Oriental-
ism, as he identifies specific Eastern cultures such as “Arabo-Moslem[s]” who
knew of and experienced the secrets and ecstasies of ars erotica.82 As a way to
complicate and “globalize” Foucault’s analysis of the deployment of sexual-
ity, Dina Al-Kassim positions ars erotica as an excess that both “haunts” and
“queers” scientia sexualis.83 As an ars erotica both “haunts” and “queers” the
public space of the garden and as Ali teaches the ladies of Holland the secrets
behind this pleasurable art, both passion and “practice soon spread.” And, as
these same ladies experiment in the art of grafting and refuse definition as
particular sexualized beings, subjectivity is no longer understood as a teleo-
logical journey. In this garden scene Winterson illustrates that Western no-
tions of queerness are not monolithic, as is often assumed. Instead the sexual
acts that are explored and experienced in the garden are solely about the feel-
ings and intensities they produce, not the truth of self that they might lead to.
It is not simply an excess of pleasure experienced by the ladies of Holland
that queers the space of the public garden, but it is also the presence of one
exotic working-class brown body among the community of white privileged
royal women. The Orientalist stereotypes that provoke the sexual violence
against Ali are the same stereotypes that draw the ladies to the “Exotic of the
East.” In The Colonial Harem Malek Alloula details that Western fantasies sur-
rounding the exotic Other are upheld by one central figure, “the very embodi-
ment of the obsession: the harem.”84 Because of the imagined “excesses” of
lesbian sex that occur behind the walls of the harem, Alloula asserts that this
space is transformed into a “universe of generalized perversions and of the ab-
solute limitlessness of pleasure.”85 Because Ali is approached as alluring, danger-
ous, and perverse, her/his presence in a harem-like situation illuminates the
promises and dangers of queer, cross-class, and cross-racial encounters and
ecstasies.
In an attempt to complicate the colonial gaze, Garber contends that there
“is another side to Orientalism; more than one kind of Western subject looks
East, and sees himself/herself already inscribed there.”86 In fact, she believes
that there are ways of appropriating the Eastern liminal figure that might pro-
vide us with a “template” for transgender and genderqueer individuals “to an-
alyze and interpret the possibilities and dignities of their own social role.”87
While the harem has distinct boundaries, a distinct inside and outside, Ali’s
pleasure garden has no such boundaries: “There is no limit to new territory.
The gate is open. Whether or not we go through is up to us.”88 As the ladies
choose to go through the gate and engage with Ali and the pleasure garden,
an ethical and pleasurable relationship between and among each other and
the natural world is imagined, practiced, and articulated. Even the Earl of
Hackney’s daughter embraces a new way of living, intervening directly in the
continuation of Empire. As the ladies, Ali, and the tulip experience a trans-
national collision of sorts, Western norms can no longer be applied to the
Other to categorize her/his inhumanity. As variation is acknowledged, plea-
sure spreads, and the surrounding community takes part in strapping on the
tulip, that which appears abnormal, pathological, and even unimaginable is
slowly normalized, depathologized, and made real. As a result, Ali’s disloca-
tion, journey, and transplantation into the garden reappropriate Orientalist
notions of a “perverse” sexuality with a difference.
As we pay attention to the diasporic travels of Ali and the tulip, we come
to realize that multiplication is not about heterosexual reproduction; that
the flower is no longer a symbol of women’s “natural” differences from men;
that an Eastern ars erotica can be successful grafted onto scientia sexualis; and
that variation, not the desire to reproduce, is the “exquisite attribute . . . that
humans and tulips share.” Not only do Ali’s exile and subsequent travels al-
low us to see the constructed nature of ideology and the violence that such
a construction reinforces, but her/his movements also allow us to envision
an alternative subculture of tulips, raced and grafted bodies, queer pleasures,
and undefined sexual identities. In the end Ali’s tale of the tulip performs and
transforms bodies, pleasures, stereotypes, and subjectivities, “making Paradise
an unsettling queer place.”89
beware of writers bearing gifts 90
In Undoing Gender Judith Butler succinctly states, “Life is foreclosed when we
decide the right way in advance.”91 Instead of dictating a plan of action for our
future(s), Butler hopes that we revel in tension, uncertainty, and unknowing-
ness. Winterson herself both lives and plays in this tension: “What keeps the
tension is the tension itself—the pull between what I am and what I can be-
come. The tug of war between the world I inherit and the world I invent.”92
Further, Winterson refuses to offer us a concise ending. Providing alternate
endings concerning Ali/x and Tulip’s relationship, Winterson also offers little
regarding the whereabouts of Ali: “What happened to him? . . . Was he back
in Turkey, tending his mother’s eggplants and tomatoes? He might have been
there, nervously dressed as a boy, telling his stories as tall as he was short.”93
Near the final pages of The PowerBook the narrator asks, “Why did I begin as I
did, with Ali and the tulip? I wanted to make a slot in time. To use time fully I
use it vertically. One life is not enough.”94
As human, animal, and environmental atrocities face us every day, daily
choices become ethical ones. Instead of despair and numbness we must be-
gin to imagine a different future for ourselves. Winterson seems to creatively
take on this political endeavor. Winterson writes, “Art is for us a reality be-
yond now. An imaginative reality that we need. The reality of art is the real-
ity of the imagination. The reality of art is not the reality of experience. The
charge laid on the artist is to bring back visions.”95 Winterson not only offers
up visions of alternative futures where queer and raced bodies are not named,
categorized, fixed, shunned, shamed, or punished, but she also acknowledges
the displacement and violence that occur to Ali. But Ali’s performance of a fe-
male masculinity deviates from the tragic narratives that have culturally sur-
rounded this identity. As a result, pain and violence are not the only affects
and acts that determine and define Ali’s subjectivity.96
Through Ali’s queer exotic working-class tale, including her/his experi-
ences with a violent uprooting and a pleasurable transplantation, Winterson
posits an ethical imperative to recognize and acknowledge all bodies that exist
in the margins. Further, through the tropes of dislocation, exile, transplanta-
tion, and grafting, she integrates fantasy into reality and is able to provide us
with an alternative “sense of place.” Ali’s pleasure garden is about a way of liv-
ing together, it is about community, it is about peacefully coexisting with each
other and with the “natural” world, it is about the right to claim public space,
and it is about sex, ethics, and justice. Ali’s presence defies the ideological no-
tion of a “body-centered identity”97 that detrimentally shapes how we act up
politically and how we approach each other as human beings. In fascinating
ways, then, with the aid of a tulip, our reliance upon static and fixed identity
categories is questioned and complicated. As she rewrites history and trans-
plants Ali into the garden, Winterson is convinced that tulips really do have a
lot to tell us about bodies and pleasures if only we look and listen: “Could that
be it—right there, in a flower—the meaning of life?”98
notes
I would first like to thank Susan Gray, Stephanie Schreiner, Shannon Schipper, the
anonymous reviewers, and the copy editor from Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies
for your thoughtful and generous feedback. Likewise, my gratitude extends to Stefanie
Dunning, Madelyn Detloff, and Katie Johnson for your critical engagement with this
piece. Finally, thank you to Catherine Fox, Erin Douglas, and Gina Patterson. All er-
rors, of course, are my own.
1. Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook (New York: Vintage, 2001), 9.
2. Winterson, PowerBook, 4.
3. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (New York:
Random House, 2001), 83.
5. Winterson, PowerBook, 251–55.
6. Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural
Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 4.
7. Pollan writes in The Botany of Desire, “Ogier Ghislain de Busbecqu, ambassador
to the court of Suleyman the Magnificent in Constantinople, claimed to have intro-
duced the tulip to Europe, sending bulbs west from Constantinople soon after he ar-
rived there in 1554” (80).
8. See Anna Pavord, The Tulip (New York: Bloomsbury, 1999), 162; Mike Dash, Tuli-
pomania: The Story of the World’s Most Coveted Flower and the Extraordinary Passions
It Aroused (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 83; Pollan, Botany of Desire, 86.
9. The concept of “gender trouble” is borrowed from Judith Butler, Gender Trouble:
Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Judith Butler,
Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004). For “her/his” see “The Need for a Gen-
der-Neutral Pronoun,” Gender Neutral Pronoun Blog; or, The Search for a Polite Specific
Gender-Neutral Third-Person Singular Pronoun, Jan. 21, 2010, http:// genderneutral
pronoun.wordpress.com/. I use gender-specific pronouns to echo Winterson’s own
use of and slippage with language, but many in the GLBTQ community, myself in-
cluded, prefer gender-neutral pronouns such as ze and hir when appropriate.
11. For ars erotica see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 57.
12. Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989),
84.
13. For historical information on the Tradescants’ endeavors in sixteenth- and sev-
enteenth-century horticultural grafting, see Shelley Saguaro, Garden Plots: The Politics
and Poetics of Gardens (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006).
14. Winterson, Sexing the Cherry, 87.
15. Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry highlights Orientalist tendencies when we are
told that the first banana brought to England in 1633 “resembled nothing more than
the private parts of an Oriental. It was yellow and livid and long” (5).
19. Winterson, PowerBook, 14; Pavord, Tulip, 162.
20. Pollan, Botany of Desire, 128–31.
23. Bente Gade, “Multiple Selves and Grafted Agents: A Postmodernist Reading of
Sexing the Cherry,” in Sponsored by Demons: The Art of Jeanette Winterson, ed. Helene
Bengtson, Marianne Borch, and Cindie Maagard (Sweden: Scholar’s Press, 1999), 29;
Laura Doan, “Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Postmodern,” in The Lesbian Postmod-
ern, ed. Laura Doan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 154.
24. Pavord, Tulip, 28.
25. Pollan, Botany of Desire, 86.
28. Descriptions come from Pavord, Tulip; Pollan, Botany of Desire; Dash, Tulipo-
mania.
35. Jago Morrison, “Who Cares about Gender at a Time like This? Love, Sex, and
the Problem of Jeanette Winterson,” Journal of Gender Studies 15, no. 1 (2006): 170.
36. Jeanette Winterson, “The Semiotics of Sex,” in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and
Effrontery (New York: Vintage, 1995), 104.
38. For more on the associations between the dildo and lesbian identity see Lisa
Moore, “Teledildonics: Virtual Lesbians in the Fiction of Jeanette Winterson,” in Sexy
Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn
(New York: Routledge, 1995), 105.
39. For crossdresser identifications see Susana Onega, Jeanette Winterson (Man-
chester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 185; Jean-Michel Ganteau, “Hearts Object:
Jeanette Winterson and the Ethics of Absolutist Romance,” in Refracting the Canon in
Contemporary British Literature and Film, ed. Susana Onega and Christian Gutleben
(New York: Rodopi, 2004), 171. For lesbian identifications see Paulina Palmer, “Jeanette
Winterson and the Lesbian Postmodern: Story-telling, Performativity and the Gay
Aesthetic,” in The Contemporary British Novel since 1980, ed. James Acheson and Sarah
C. E. Ross (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 189; Mine Kılıç Özyurt, “Transgressing Gender
Boundaries: The Function of the Fantastic in Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook,”
English Studies 89, no. 3 (June 2005): 299.
40. Leslie Feinberg, Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue (Boston: Beacon Press,
1999), 8.
41. Patrick Califia, Speaking Sex to Power: The Politics of Queer Sex (San Francisco:
Cleis Press, 2002).
43. Ulf Cronquist, “Hypertext, Prosthetics, and the Netocracy: Posthumanism and
Jeanette Winterson’s The PowerBook,” in The Writer’s Craft, The Culture’s Technology,
ed. Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Michael Toolan (New York: Rodopi, 2005), 53.
44. Cronquist writes in “Hypertext, Prosthetics, and the Netocracy,” “Winterson’s
novel is always already branded: it is a PowerBook by Macintosh. Sold, advertised, pro-
duced; a daydream nation logo. The browser she uses for her PowerBook is Netscape.
This is indeed monstrous” (54). For “repudiation” see Miguel Mota, “What’s in a
Name? The Case of jeanettewinterson.com,” Twentieth-Century Literature 50, no. 2
(Summer 2004): 193. For “shamelessness” see Ganteau, “Hearts Object,” 174.
46. Jeffrey Roessner, “Writing a History of Difference: Jeanette Winterson’s Sex-
ing the Cherry and Angela Carter’s Wise Children,” College Literature 29, no. 1 (Winter
2002): 110; Cronquist, “Hypertext, Prosthetics, and the Netocracy,” 55.
47. Jean Bobby Noble, “Boys Do Cry: Epistemologies of a Pronoun,” Torquere: Jour-
nal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Studies Association 3 (2001): 41; Jean Bobby No-
ble, Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Land-
scape (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2006); Madelyn Detloff, “Living in ‘Energetic Space’:
Jeanette Winterson’s Bodies and Pleasures,” English Language Notes 45, no. 2 (Fall–
Winter 2007): 156. Noble writes, “I prefer the trope of ‘grafting’ to ‘transition’ because
it allows me to reconfigure what I mean by trans-gender or trans-sexual. . . . My gender
now looks different from the one I grew up with but my body is, paradoxically, almost
still the same. . . . Grafting allows me to think that relation” (83).
50. Dash, Tulipomania, 32; Pavord, Tulip, 60. For (re)discovery of the clitoris see
Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Anatomies of Rapture: Clitoral Politics/Medical Blazons,” Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 27, no. 2 (2001): 316. Harvey details that al-
though Columbus’s “find” was the first to be documented, Gabriel Fallopia disputed
this and claimed the discovery as his own.
51. Grace Kyungwon Hong, “‘A Shared Queerness’: Colonialism, Transnationalism,
and Sexuality in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Meridians: Feminism, Race,
Transnationalism 7, no. 1 (2006): 80.
52. Pollan details that Clusius is known as the first man in Europe to ever receive
the flower (Botany of Desire, 83).
53. Dash, Tulipomania, 42.
54. Stephen L. Dellaporta and Alejandro Calderon-Urrea, “Sex Determination in
Flowering Plants,” Plant Cell 5 (1993): 1241–51. Interestingly, flowers that become em-
blems of perfection contain both sex organs and are often referred to as “androgy-
nous” and/or “bisexual.”
55. For more on how “excessive” and “perverse” bodies are discursively joined
through the categories of race and sexuality, see Michelle Wright, Becoming Black: Cre-
ating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Siobhan
Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in Amer-
ican Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).
56. Marjorie Garber, “The Chic of Araby: Transvestism, Transsexualism and the
Erotics of Cultural Appropriation,” in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural
Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 348.
57. Richard F. Burton, “The Sotadic Zone (1886),” in Sexology Uncensored: The Doc-
uments of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998), 204.
58. Burton, “Sotadic Zone,” 204.
59. Burton, “Sotadic Zone,” 204.
60. To read more about twenty-first-century violences incited by Orientalist ste-
reotypes, see Joseph A. Massad, Desiring Arabs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2007); Jasbir K. Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” Social Text 23, nos. 3–4 (Fall–
Winter 2005): 121–40.
61. Siobhan Somerville, “Introduction: Race,” in Bland and Doan, Sexology Uncen-
sored, 203.
63. Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises; or, The Homoerotics of Orientalism,”
PMLA 110, no. 1 (Jan. 1995): 94.
65. Pavord, Tulip, 30. According to Pavord, although the first pleasure garden in
Constantinople was developed by Sultan Mehmed II in the fifteenth century, the Gar-
den of Leiden is the actual location where the tulip trade began in 1553–54 as Clusius
cultivated the first bulbs there.
66. Lucile Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal
Botanic Gardens (London: Yale University Press, 2002), 6; Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire:
Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xxii.
68. See Michael Crozier, “After the Garden?” South Atlantic Quarterly 98, no. 4 (Fall
1999): 628.
69. Sarah Phillips Casteel, “New World Pastoral: The Caribbean Garden and Em-
placement in Giséle Pineau and Shani Mootoo,” Interventions 5, no. 1 (2003): 12–28.
70. Casteel, “New World Pastoral,” 27.
71. Pollan, Botany of Desire, 142–43.
72. For more on queer public spaces and subcultures see Michael Warner, The Trou-
ble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (New York: Free Press, 1999).
73. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 165.
74. Pollan, Botany of Desire, xv.
77. Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 57; Casid, Sowing Empire, xv;
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 158.
78. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 10.
79. See Ruth Beilin, “Cultivating the Global Garden,” South Atlantic Quarterly 98,
no. 4 (Fall 1999): 761–79. Beilin writes, “Demarcation lines affirmed an ‘other side’
where, at the very least, something of a different order lay” (763).
80. Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 57.
81. Foucault, History of Sexuality: An Introduction, 57.
82. See Puar, “Queer Times, Queer Assemblages,” 138; Dina Al-Kassim, “Epilogue:
Sexual Epistemologies, East in West,” in Islamicate Sexualities: Translations across Tem-
poral Geographies of Desire, ed. Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2008), 302; Kathryn Babayan and Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Pref-
ace,” in Babayan and Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities, xi; Valerie Traub, “The Past Is a
Foreign Country?: The Times and Spaces of Islamicate Sexuality Studies,” in Babayan
and Najmabadi, Islamicate Sexualities, 17.
83. Al-Kassim, “Epilogue,” 308.
84. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3.
85. Alloula, Colonial Harem, 95. Also see Emily Apter, “Female Trouble in the Colo-
nial Harem,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4, no. 1 (1992): 205–24.
86. Garber, “Chic of Araby,” 245.
87. Garber, “Chic of Araby,” 245.
88. Jeanette Winterson, “Imagination and Reality,” in Art Objects, 151.
89. Casid, Sowing Empire, 1.
90. Jeanette Winterson, “A Work of My Own,” in Art Objects, 189.
91. Butler, Undoing Gender, 39.
95. Winterson, “Imagination and Reality,” 148.
96. See Madelyn Detloff, “Gender Please, without the Gender Police: Rethinking
Pain in Archetypal Narratives of Butch, Transgender, and FTM Masculinity,” Journal
of Lesbian Studies 10, nos. 1–2 (2006): 87–105.
97. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 5.

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“When Is a Tulip Not a Tulip?

”: Grafting, Exoticism, and Pleasure Gardens in Jeanette

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horticultural and corporeal grafting

32 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 3

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tertium non data: the third is not given 34

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the exotic of the east

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the troubling of empire and paradise

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48 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 3

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50 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 3

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52 frontiers/2012/vol. 33, no. 3

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