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In this paper, I examine how research with holobionts (the coagulations of host bodies and other species living in or around them) challenges the onto-epistemological status of the model organism, and the privileging of sex in both sexual selection and queer theories. These theories are complicit in defining norms of sexuality.[1] Although the definition of sex is complex and disputed,[2] dominant sexual selection theories draw from studies of sexually dimorphic individuals (apparently) who reproduce through sex acts, and queer theory, which is defined by sexual desire, is entangled with sexual selection in refusal and in kind. However, an ecology of sex and reproduction occurs within model organisms, including constant asexual cellular and microbial reproduction.[3] The microbial asexuality on which holobionts depend challenges queer and sexual selection theories to explore their exclusionary operations and legacies of sexed individualism.

 [1] Kristina Gupta, “‘And Now I’m Just Different, but There’s Nothing Actually Wrong With Me’: Asexual Marginalization and Resistance,” Journal of Homosexuality vol. 64, no. 8 (2017): 991–1013, 1003.[2] Janet L. Leonard, “Sexual Selection: Lessons From Hermaphrodite Mating Systems,” Integrative and Comparative Biology vol. 46, no. 4 (2005): 349–367. Duur Aanen, Madeleine Beekman, and Hanna Kokko, “Weird Sex: The Underappreciated Diversity of Sexual Reproduction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences vol. 371, issue 1706 (October 2016).[3] Graham Bell, “Experimental Sexual Selection in Chlamydomonas,” Journal of Evolutionary Biology vol. 18, no. 3 (May 2005): 722–734. Myra Hird, “Animal Transex,” Australian Feminist Studies vol. 20, no. 49 (2006): 35–50.