Perrin Roosevelt Ireland on "Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex"
Author Perrin Roosevelt Ireland on her book Poking the Squid: What We Can Learn from Animal Sex, in conversation with UChicago's Rachel Moran, Assistant Professor of Ecology and Evolution About the book: The secret sex lives of animals are not so secret anymore, thanks to this brilliant, punchy illustrated guide to how the other 99.99% get it on. In delightful watercolor comics of pregnant seahorse dads, spider oral sex, and the four-headed echidna penis, Perrin Roosevelt Ireland takes us on a wild biodiversity ride through queerness, infidelity, consent, divorce, sex change, and even sexual cannibalism in the animal world. Poking the Squid illustrates the splendid diversity of nature's eroticism. For too long, science has prudishly obscured the wildly creative kinkiness of animal sexual behavior. But Poking the Squid celebrates how assumptions about sex are shifting.About the author: Perrin Roosevelt Ireland is an artist and environmentalist. For a decade, she worked at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), ultimately as deputy to the executive director. Her artwork has been published in Discover, Nature, Scientific American, and The Rumpus. She serves on the board of the Roosevelt Institute, was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the New York Aquarium and is a Banff Graphic Novel Resident. Perrin lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her cats (and muses) Ursula and Pudge.About the interlocutor:Rachel Moran is an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology & Evolution at the University of Chicago. Her research explores how reproductive behaviors evolve and contribute to the formation of new species, using freshwater fishes as a model system. Her lab combines behavioral experiments, genomics, and neural imaging approaches to study mate choice, aggression, parental care, and hybridization.Presented by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, and the Biological Sciences Divison.Free and open the public.