This essay puts forth a theory of “affective ecologies” encompassing plant, animal, and human interactions. The authors’ formulation of “involution” favors a coevolution of organisms that act not on competitive pressures but on affective relations. Drawing in particular from—and challenging—Darwinian and neo-Darwinian accounts of orchid-insect contact and controversial research on plant communication, Hustak and Myers demonstrate the interdependence of seemingly unrelated life forms. The evolving entity within this framework is not an individual organism but a community of organisms in communication with one another, exemplified by the transmission of information through chemical signaling among plants, which forces readers to question what it means to communicate. This relationality also begs a reconsideration of the dynamic between a human subject who conducts an experiment and an animal or plant object of study, which the essay approaches by showing how Darwin became a participant in his own orchid experiments. Taken together, these feminist readings of ecological and evolutionary phenomena result in the dissolution of species and even kingdom boundaries.

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Through the case study of Mabel Dodge, the mystic of Greenwich Village, this article shows how new forms of knowledge and free love converged in a turn to interrogating the female self. Mabel Dodge's practice of subjectivity is an early twentieth-century example of what Michel Foucault called the 'hermeneutics of the subject', a form of spirituality grounded in the pursuit of the 'truth' of the self. Dodge's efforts to grasp her 'secret concentrated essence' reveal an early twentieth-century invention of a new feminist spirituality at the crossroads of occultism, social reform, and sciences of psychology and biology.