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Curious Lives: Victorian Mushroom Hunters and Queer Possibility

Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information Office
January 12, 2026
cla-pio@alaska.edu

On a snowy Wednesday afternoon in Gruening 503, the room settled into a familiar WGSS rhythm. Pizza boxes folded open, Zoom tiles blinked to life, and students leaned forward as Dr. Samantha Botz invited everyone to imagine something as small as a mushroom, and as unwieldy as a hoop skirt.

“It begins with a slowing down, a stooping down, a meeting of eye and earth,” she read, her voice pulling the room down toward the forest floor. The image was ordinary and strange at once. A Victorian woman kneels to inspect a delicate parasol-shaped mushroom, her skirts ballooning around her like a ring of fungi.

From that moment on, the afternoon became less a lecture and more a guided walk into a different way of seeing: through fungi, through gender, and through the lives of women whose work has long been treated as marginal, amateur, or simply odd.

Stooping down to see differently

Botz is an assistant professor of eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature in UAF’s English Department and an affiliated faculty member in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research moves easily across Victorian ghost stories, British folklore, queer ecologies, and contemporary environmental humanities. In this talk, titled Curious Lives: Victorian Mushroom Hunters and Queer Possibility, she lingered in that overlap where literature, science, and gender history all touch.

Mycology, she explained, began to crystallize as a distinct scientific field in the mid-nineteenth century. It did so in no small part because a number of self-taught women could not quite leave mushrooms alone. Where others saw something slimy or suspect, they saw an invitation.

Victorian culture was, as Botz reminded the room, deeply invested in tidy binaries. Plants were slotted into male and female parts. Women were sorted into domestic angels or dangerous excess. Fungi refused all of it. Not quite plant, not quite animal, proliferating in rings and threads that ignore fences and categories, mushrooms offered an unruly counterexample to the story science thought it was telling about nature and gender.

“To exclaim ‘what a lot of toadstools’ is to dismiss an entire world,” Botz said, paraphrasing nineteenth-century writer Margaret Plues, who complained about men who admired the tiniest moss yet kicked over baskets of fungi in disgust. For women who took fungi seriously, paying attention to mushrooms became a way of quietly resisting the rules about what counted as beautiful, valuable, or respectable.

Victorian women, forbidden fungi

The heart of Botz’s talk followed one of those women, Anna Maria Hussey, whose nineteenth-century book Illustrations of British Mycology combined meticulous scientific description with luminous watercolor plates.

Hussey, Botz noted, was “by all accounts unhappily married to a clergyman” and raising six children, only two of whom survived to adulthood. In letters to her mentor, the Reverend Miles J. Berkeley, Hussey tried to articulate what it meant to live between her obligations and her obsession.

“I am always under the uncomfortable impression that the thing I am doing is not the right thing to be doing,” she confessed in 1849.

The line drew a hush in the room. It was easy to hear not only a Victorian woman’s anxiety, but something more familiar: the feeling of being out of step with what the world expects, whether in career, family, gender, or desire.

For Hussey, mushrooms became both escape and anchor. She collaborated with her sister on illustrations, supplied specimens to Berkeley for what would become a massive fungal collection at Kew Gardens, and turned her parlor into a makeshift lab. Tea trays became staging grounds for spore prints. Glasses meant for guests were overturned to shelter delicate caps while she worked.

The domestic space that confined her also became, however briefly, a site of experiment and wonder. The fungi did not solve the constraints of her life, but in Botz’s telling, they made room inside it for a different kind of attention and care.

Queer possibilities in the mushroom kingdom

Part of the power of fungi, Botz suggested, lies in how stubbornly they refuse to behave like the tidy plants described in Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, with its talk of “public marriages” between male stamens and female pistils. Mushrooms do not fit the script.

“Mushrooms defy objectivity and standardization,” she said, citing contemporary mycologist Patricia Kaishian. They appear suddenly, vanish quickly, communicate underground through vast networks, and, if one insists on gendering them, can possess thousands of mating types rather than two.

It is not hard, Botz argued, to understand why queer thinkers and artists are drawn to them. They offer a living metaphor for fluidity, multiplicity, and forms of kinship that ignore conventional boundaries. Fungi are not simply stand-ins for human identities, but they help loosen the grip of the idea that there is only one natural way to live in a body or relate to others.

“They are better thought of not as a thing, but as a process, an exploratory, irregular tendency,” she added, borrowing a phrase from author Merlin Sheldrake. In that framing, mushrooms look less like background scenery and more like collaborators in imagining different futures.

A room full of questions

After the talk, the event shifted into conversation. Students and faculty in the room and online began to test the metaphors against their own experiences.

One student attendee pointed to what feels like a recent “resurgence” of mushrooms in popular culture. Others mentioned horror stories and prestige video games like “The Last of Us” that use fungal infection as a vehicle for apocalyptic storytelling and showcase a queer heroine.

Botz agreed that both fascination and fear are at work. Mushrooms unsettle people. They raise questions about bodies that blur into each other, about networks that operate without obvious leaders, about life that thrives on decay. That unease, several participants noted, mirrors the way some people react to queer and trans communities, with a similar mix of ignorance, projection, and anxiety about categories coming undone.

Another student circled back to Hussey’s art. They were struck by how carefully she painted “ugly” mushrooms alongside conventionally beautiful ones, refusing to flatter or sanitize them. “She did not judge them,” the student said, offering what felt like both an aesthetic and an ethical reading of Hussey’s work.

Throughout the discussion, faculty in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and allied departments joined in, connecting mushrooms’ many “genders” to contemporary debates about imposed binaries and policy. Others spoke about local mushroom walks in Alaska, new field guides written by women, and their own experiences learning to tell a deadly lookalike from an edible chanterelle. Knowledge, as Botz had suggested earlier, is not only power, it is also a form of care.

From British woodlands to Interior Alaska

Although Hussey’s story unfolded in nineteenth-century England, the questions her life raises felt surprisingly at home at UAF. Many students in the room are building degrees that cross English, history, political science, environmental studies, and WGSS. They are already navigating multiple disciplines and roles, much like the Victorian women who slipped between parlor, forest, and field notebook.

Botz herself teaches that kind of boundary crossing. In addition to courses in eighteenth and nineteenth-century British literature, she offers classes on contemporary science fiction and fantasy, literary theory with a strong gender and sexuality component, and a Jane Austen course this spring 2026 semester that can count toward the WGSS minor. Her scholarship threads together folklore, hauntings, and queer ecologies, with an eye toward how stories and landscapes shape each other.

Endlessly fruiting stories

Botz closed her prepared remarks by returning to Hussey’s fate. The mycologist who devoted herself to what others found disgusting died at age forty-eight in a French asylum, her final days clouded by alcohol withdrawal and the opaque decisions of those who had power over her life. The archive, Botz reminded the audience, goes quiet at precisely the point we might most want to understand.

She did not offer easy consolation. Instead, she wondered aloud if there is “a kind of comfort, however small, to be found in having loved the unlovable, the strange, the fleeting.” Mushrooms depend on other species’ curiosity to spread their spores. Books depend on readers in much the same way.

“A book in the hands of readers,” she concluded, “is an endlessly fruiting body.”

In Gruening 503 that afternoon, surrounded by pizza crusts, laptop screens, and a circle of people thinking together, it was not hard to see what she meant. Victorian mushroom hunters, queer ecologies, and the lived realities of students at a public university in Alaska are not obvious companions. Yet brought into conversation by a careful reader and teacher, they began to fruit in unexpected ways.

Long after the Zoom call ended and the last chair was pushed back under the table, the questions lingered. What happens when we take seriously the lives treated as marginal, whether fungal or human? What kinds of knowledge grow in the gaps between disciplines and categories? And how might attention, patient and curious, become its own quiet form of resistance?

 

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The WGSS program hosts monthly meetings on the first Wednesday of each month, typically from 1:00–2:30 p.m. in Gruening 503H (the CLA conference room), featuring a guest speaker from across campus sharing a compelling topic from their field. Spring 2026 promises more thought-provoking conversations, beginning with Assistant Professor of History Mary Ludwig, whose talk, “Four-Thousand Miles From Home: Alaska Natives at Carlisle Boarding School and Beyond,” examines how Alaska Native students navigated and resisted the goals of a distant boarding school system. All are welcome. Pizza, brownies, and drinks are provided, and a is always available for those who can’t attend in person.