Queer Science Research Articles

The Joy of Queer Science Fiction Reading, or: Will Queers Destroy Science Fiction?

The paper seeks to examine the connections between “queer reading” and “science fiction reading” from the perspective of readers’ recollections of their juvenile experiences of “looking for clues” in queer sf narratives. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, I discuss the idea of queer adolescent reading as a possibly transformative experience that offers exciting theoretical opportunities for academic scholarship on the fantastic. By turning attention to selected testaments of adolescent queer readerly experiences, written by both writers and fans, I hope to demonstrate both the personal (individual) and collective nature of queer self-recognition through these intense and affective engagements with sf texts. A closer examination of a collection of short essays in which authors reflect on the provocative idea of “queers destroying sf,”also based on individual recollections of engaging with sf as young readers, expands the discussion to incorporate fan activity and the question of queer canon-forming.

Fugitive publics: sex, sexuality, and science communication

This article attends to the absences and silences of sexual identity and knowledge in science communication scholarship. It locates identitarian debates within this scholarship and utilises queer theory to encourage a shift towards a post-identitarian approach to conceptualising sex (as a social act) in science communication. In this way, this article advocates for a queer science communication that critically examines normative identities, practices, institutions, and policies, and makes room for subjugated knowledges within science communication theory and practice.

The Fantasy of Anorexia: Historical Entanglements of Evolutionary Thought, Food Restriction, and Curative Imaginaries

There has been a recent increase in literature that critically engages how anorexic people experience their symptoms and challenges the current approaches to recovery in treatment centers. Yet, this work does not grapple with transnational scientific histories of the medicalized construction of eating disorders that affect who is able to be legible as eating disordered. Doing so (re)naturalizes anorexia as a disease that predominantly affects white girls and women, reinforcing erasures of those not easily interpellated into anorexic subjective positions. I address this gap through a disability studies and queer science studies grounding. I analyze early French writings on anorexia’s emergent forms, US dietetics in the burgeoning domestic science movement, and the differential pathologization of body size in the context of evolutionary thinking on capacity, debility, and nervousness. In doing so, I argue that anorexia nervosa emerges through racist sciences that spread and transformed across US-Euro imperial medical geographies, effectively functioning as a curative approach to the contradictions between white supremacist securitization of whiteness and its reproductive futurities. This paper highlights implications for present eating disorder diagnostic norms, re-situating them in a broader geohistorical context during which hierarchies of ability and personhood were organized through race, gender, and capacity.

Feminist and queer science: Principles for research with gender, sex, and sexuality in psychology and beyond.

Feminist and queer science: Principles for research with gender, sex, and sexuality in psychology and beyond.

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

Queer Ecology in Loïe Fuller's Modernist Dance and Magnus Hirschfeld's Die Transvestiten.

Dance orients the performer's body toward both environment and pleasure, yet the intersection of environmental and sexual attunement in dance practice remains an underexplored area of research. This article considers how environmental and sexual readings of dance practice can be brought together by proposing a queer ecological approach to modernist dance. Drawing on research in dance studies, feminist and queer science studies, and sexology studies, the article examines the work of Loïe Fuller, an early pioneer of modernist dance, to show how Fuller's work engages with themes of both sex and nature and consequently introduces environmentally attuned thinking to early twentieth century sexual knowledge production. By examining the parallels and divergences between Magnus Hirschfeld's early twentieth-century sexological writing about "transvestitism" and Loïe Fuller's modernist dance, via the copycat dancer Henry Cyril Paget, I show that both dance and sexology rethought the relationship between sex and nature by grappling, to different extents, with a queer vision of nature, where nature loses its explanatory force and moral authority. This reveals the importance of nature and the nonhuman in the production of modern concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality and the important role that dance can play in illuminating the intersection of sex and nature.

Wasted: Wastewater, Hygiene Theatrics, and Contaminated Imaginaries

This collaborative essay takes up three pungent streams of wastewater to address how environments, politics, communities, and power are mediated by liquid waste: urine, feces, and everything else recklessly flushed down toilets, washed down drains, stored in pits, and dumped in the ocean. “Wasted” looks to the multi-scalar worlds of wastewater by centering waste sites and COVID-19 concerns regarding wastewater virality. First, our tour of Santa Barbara’s El Estero Water Resource Center brings us to the variegated, embodied, multi-sensory, and multispecies communities of wastewater. El Estero provides an odoriferous infrastructural current through which we follow wastewater and the socialites and environments it mediates on California’s Central Coast. We then move to the ways wastewater has been interwoven with global pandemic fears to address how human waste retains infectious COVID-19 viral material even after it has been flushed away. COVID-19, in other words, haunts the infrastructural ports through which wastewater is funneled. We conclude with wastewater’s epochal effects within the Anthropocene. Throughout, we offer the term “hygiene theatrics” to identify how the performance of hygiene, cleanliness, and purity rely on dichotomous constructions of dirtiness and cleanliness that reinforce structural power dynamics including racism and homophobia. “Wasted” is a collaborative feminist and queer experiment in form and methodology that explores wastewater as both a material reality and a theoretical apparatus that is informed by and contributes to the environmental humanities, infrastructure studies, and feminist and queer science studies.

Microaggression Experiences of Queer Science Students in Their Departments

This study explored how the feelings of comfort and safety of LGBTQ+ undergraduate science majors in their departments at a mid-size Midwestern university affected their academic success. The literature provides a number of studies about LGBTQ+ STEM faculty, campus and departmental climate studies for LGBTQ+ students, and microaggressions experienced by a variety of students and faculty from historically underrepresented groups. There is little literature directly connecting campus climate work to STEM departments’ climates and the experiences of LGBTQ+ undergraduates. This study utilized a qualitative approach to explore the experiences of STEM majors who identified as LGBTQ+. A narrative approach to the research emphasized the voices of these marginalized students. Three participants participated in one interview per semester over two subsequent semesters for a total of six interviews, which were then coded using emergent themes. The most interesting findings were related to potential microaggressions experienced by the students, such as specific passive negative experiences or general negative feelings about expressing their identities. This study found that LGBTQ+ undergraduates in science departments may experience microaggressions because of their sexual orientation but may lack the language to describe these situations in detail or identify them as harmful. Thus, there is a need to examine and potentially improve science students’ language tools to better identify and describe these experiences.

Queer science: Temporality and futurity for queer students in STEM

The sociopolitical landscape for queer people has changed dramatically in recent decades; however, progress has been both halting and uneven. While this is evident in many areas of professional and private life, this study focuses on the experiences of queer students in STEM learning environments in US colleges and universities. Specifically, we explore student expressions of temporality and futurity with regards to their STEM experiences and aspirations. Engagement with queer theory, especially queer formulations of time and space, alerted us to the importance of sociopolitical developments of the past several decades—particularly the rise and entrenchment of neoliberal politics in both academic STEM arenas and gay and queer politics. Engaging with queer temporality and spatiality, neoliberalism, and the homonormative turn, we found three interdependent themes: (1) the (re)negotiation of queer politics within academic disciplines linked to the neoliberal state; (2) the multiple bifurcations of self, time, and space required to simultaneously navigate queerness and STEM; and (3) the development of utopian projections of the future intended to reconcile queer identity, neoliberalism, and STEM. These findings point to a tension between queer identities and STEM fields arising not from the nature of the fields themselves but from science’s interconnectedness with a neoliberal economy. This tension not only structures participants’ current experiences in STEM learning spaces but also flavors the way they consider their futures as queer scientists.

Russia's Queer Science, or How Anti‐LGBT Scholarship is Made

The absence of a politicized gay community and of any real scholarly consensus about sexuality in Russia has made it possible for new “scholars” to advance theories of sexuality that are very much at odds with those that are accepted in Europe and the United States. Much mainstream Russian scholarship on queer topics from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Sociology Faculty of Moscow State University is highly ideological and based on the universalizing concept that everyone can become lesbian or gay. This paper analyzes several articles written between 2012 and 2014 by prominent Russian sources to show how they confuse concepts basic to queer theory and gender studies (gender/sex/sexual orientation/gender identity), while repeating accounts from right‐wing conservative and anti‐LGBT activists and discredited scholars from the United States. The few Russian scholars who are integrated into international gender studies and queer scholarship tend to be marginalized, while more established senior scholars at important institutions tend to be ideological and anti‐LGBT. This situation has facilitated the adoption of anti‐LGBT laws in Russia, and some of these scholars participate in global right‐wing anti‐gender and anti‐LGBT networks like the World Congress of Families.

EPHEMERAPHILIA

This article has as its focus a queer object – an otherwise unremarkable ticket for an eighteenth-century assembly or ball in a collection of tickets made by Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, an influential figure in the development of the British Museum in the Victorian period. I argue that the ticket is a tribute to a larger collection, also in the British Museum, made by Sarah Sophia Banks, in order to make claims for the attention to printed ephemera as a queer science that was foundational in the conceptualization and practice of archives of all kinds. The queer object of Franks’s ticket, in relation to the history of printed ephemera, is used to contextualize and historicize debates about ephemera in contemporary queer theory and cultural studies more generally.

ACTS AGAINST NATURE

This paper makes an argument for greater consideration of negativity in queer engagements with biological or natural systems. Focusing on one particular paper by Karen Barad – “Nature’s Queer Performativity (The Authorized Version)” – I argue that this work tends to under-read the negativity and confusion that queer entails, and so it renders nature, and the politics we might extract from it, more palatable than perhaps they should be. What interests me is that Barad’s argument about nature’s queer performativity begins and ends with sodomy (“acts against nature”). While it has been a highly cathected site of analysis for some early and influential work in queer theory, sodomy has been little discussed in feminist and queer science studies where Barad’s work has been so influential. I argue that sodomy (a menace that cannot be erased from the political or conceptual landscape) spoils any identitarian queer politics that attempt to depathologize or reaffirm the natural world.

Australian Queer Science Fiction Fans

ABSTRACTScience fiction (sf) does more than provide a fleeting moment of entertainment; it has many personal and social functions. In addition to offering audiences “romantic escapism” (Gerrold, 1996, pp. 5–6), sf also enables the “postulation of an alternative reality from which to contemplate this one” (Gerrold, 1996, pp. 5–6); as such, it is especially important “for groups which have had limited stakes in the status quo” (Jenkins, 1995, p. 242). To date, no research has been undertaken on the relationship between Australian queers and sf fandom. This article reports the findings of an online survey and explores the psycho-social features of Australian queer sf fans and why they like the genre. While the characteristics of this sample mirror those of Australian queers generally, they also have slightly higher rates of mental illness and are far more likely to state they have “no religion.” Furthermore, while enjoying the “sciency” (P10, bisexual woman) aspects of sf, Australian queers also like the “poignant metaphors for our own civilization” (P45, asexual man)

Those who can’t, teach: critical science literacy as a queer science of failure

In this paper, I argue that those of us who have left the Sciences proper and moved to feminist studies spaces have continued to do science through our teaching. In a moment when the impulse to do real science is palpitating in our feminist hearts, I suggest that we critically examine the political stakes of our affective attachments and detachments from s/Science(s). I consider what it means to be attached to a Science that earned its epistemic authority through its co-constitution with colonization and slavery. I argue that passion for science may act to strengthen the relationship between Science and Truth and conversely, willful refusal and failure may be used to break the bond. I offer critical science literacy as a practice that can directly challenge the epistemic authority of Science and be read as "doing science" or more broadly as "rewriting knowledge."

Schrödinger's notebook: Shifting real

Abstract The science fiction prototype featured in this article is the second chapter of a novel in progress that contains an omnibus of interventions into physics, queer science, feminism, and intellectual history. The title of the article references the notebooks of Erwin Schrodinger, a Nobel-Prize winning physicist who discovered wave theory that superseded Heisenberg's more complex form of mathematical formalism, therefore changing the way in which interpretation is done. Despite being part of a series, the prototype is written so it could be read as a standalone. The story, combined with a critical explication of its background and intent, produces the contestations illustrating the relationships between physics, the cultures in science and technology, as well as politics extending over the internal and external values of the scientific enterprise. Specifically, the differences between these values are rendered impossible through the epistemic continuity stemming from a shared ontology. At the same time, the prototype also forecasts the possibility of future technologies based on current and possible developments in physics while contesting the notion of a ‘good life’ these technologies supposedly offer. As a politically inclined epistemic move, the prototype will demonstrate points of amplification in the interactions taking place at the microscopic level for manifestation in our macroscopic space. Therefore, the amplified microscopic interactions are in competition with the observables in our ‘meatspace’ dominated by the conventions of classical physics. The prototype also acts as a speculative device for modeling probable outcomes stemming from different constraint sets, thereby acting as an ‘algorithmic’ blueprint for the narration of scenarios produced as an outcome of macro- and micro-entanglement.

Embodied Visions: Chinese Queer Experimental Documentaries by Shi Tou and Cui Zi'en

This article explores the visual representation of minority (especially queer) identities in the highly stylized and experimental documentaries of independent filmmakers Shi Tou and Cui Zi'en, two of the most prominent cultural figures in the Chinese queer community. My analysis focuses on Shi's documentary 50 Minutes of Women (2005) and Cui's semi-documentary Night Scene (2003) in conjunction with discussions of Shi's paintings and Cui's queer science fiction as well as his other video works such as The Narrow Path (2003) and Shi Tou and That Nana (2005). Through a close examination of the intimately embodied vision, haptic camera, reflexive performances, as well as subjectivized editing strategies manifest in their works, I demonstrate that Shi and Cui not only present alternative perspectives on identity issues from inside the queer communities but, more significantly, they practice a boldly performative and intimately engaged mode of documentary filmmaking and in the process challenge the very distinction between documentary and fiction, truth and opinion, self and other. Their embodied approaches not only demonstrate the potential of minority discourses to actively and critically engage social reality but also represent an important direction — that of increasing reflexivity — for the continued development of documentary filmmaking in China.

Queer Science, the Writer's Sorcery, and the Postcolonial Question

The third time I visited D. Carleton Gajdusek, an ambulance was blocking the street outside his apartment building in Amsterdam. It had been there some time, and the drivers of the cars behind it lounged about outside. Some shook their heads and muttered to themselves or talked loudly into their mobile phones; some walked up and down; some shrugged their shoulders; others smoked cigarettes and waited patiently.Although itwas summer,amistyDutchrain had started tofall.Iwentinside and quickly up the stairs to his room. A large, thickset man, partly dressed, was arguing with the ambulance officers. It was Carleton, who did not want them to take him to the emergency room at the Amsterdam Medical Center. He shouted and waved his arms in the air and paced theroom.Afriendofhiswhowasvisitinghadcalledthemanhourearlier.Shetoldme it seemed he was havinga stroke, thoughthe incident lasted only a few minutes. As he recovered, his speech slurred and he became angry and aggressive. I spoke with him, trying to calm him and persuade him to go to hospital, if only for a checkup. Eventually, he agreed. I was with him in the ambulance when he suffered another attack. Always immensely talkative, he suddenly stopped speaking, initially unable to move at all, then shaking alittle. Hestared atme as he tried to makeasound. I had never noticed before how blue his eyes were and how penetrating his stare. It dawned on me that he was having another seizure. Gradually he came around again, and when he regained the ability to talk he denounced my stupid performance of compassion and concern. At the medical center, a young doctor insisted that he first talk with the patient alone,despiteourprotests.Hereturnedtenminuteslater,frowning.Hetoldushisnew patient was obviouslypsychotic,claimingtohavewonaNobelPrize andtrainedmost of the world’s leading neuroscientists. Agitated and angry, this crazy old man was demanding to go home so he could prepare for a flight to Siberia, where he was supposed to address an international conference on some mysterious brain disease! The young doctorwantedtostart antipsychoticmedication assoon aspossible,but we

Blinding me with (queer) science: religion, sexuality, and (post?) modernity

This essay brings to bear insights from continental philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith Butler on the science of (homo)sexuality and, more importantly, the desire to use such science to resolve contemporary conflicts over homosexuality’s acceptability. So-called “queer science” remains deeply beholden to modern notions of sex, gender, and sexuality, the author argues, a schematic that its premodern (Christian) roots further denaturalize. The philosophical insights drawn from this analysis are then applied to the controversy over homosexuality within global Christianity that often pits the “backward” former colonies against the “modern” west.

The de-representation of science and queer science students in higher education within the queer/gay discourse

A group of science students self-identifying as gay or queer have only talked of their sexuality and gender feelings, and their experiences within higher education, on the completion of their studies. The reasons for their alienation from, and further marginalisation by the queer discourse are discussed. These include the stereotyping of gay sensibility, anti-science prejudice, classism and fundamentalist constructivism. An argument is made for the reintegration of science within the gay/queer discourse, particularly in light of recent work which ‘queers’ natural history, since the valuing of science within the discourse would both allow and encourage the visibility of queer science students, making the science class and laboratory safer spaces. Throughout, reference is made to the marginalisation and emotional labour involved in negotiating invisibility which impedes both learning and the recognition of learning, and which would be challenged by the recognition of the value of science within the discourse.

Queer Politics, Queer Science?

Queer Politics, Queer Science?