Animal totems / Friday with Jo

Animal totems

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People & Blogs

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• genderqueerchat

[liminalD]

@liminalD ... for instance, in most bird species, parenting is a shared duty, with both male and female taking roughly equal turns incubating the eggs and later fetching food for the hatchlings. the more gendered behaviours largely take place prior to the forging of a pair bond, with males of many species building the nest to attract a mate and then performing mating displays (including singing). Although, I guess it's debatable how much of all this is 'gendered' as such.

[liminalD]

I dunno if anyone else has mentioned it, but there's a great book by Joan Roughgarden called 'Evolution's Rainbow', which is all about homosexualities and transsexual behaviours (and even physiological changes) in the animal world. The most obvious examples of 'trans' adaptation are among fish and amphibians, but the book also highlights how our notions of masculinity and femininity are largely the product of our being mammalian and more specifically, primates. Birds are an interesting contrast

[rriverstone1]

We see what we're looking to see.

[SydneyTinker]

You as a stallion is a trippy mental image.