Profs call for ‘queer feminist science’ in new anthology

A group of feminist professors will publish a new anthology in November extolling the merits of the emerging field of “queer feminist science.”

The anthology, Queer Feminist Science: A Reader, will be released on November 16, and is edited by a team of Women’s Studies professors including New York University’s Cyd Cipolla, Wake Forest University’s Kristina Gupta, South Florida University’s David A. Rubin, and Mount Holyoke College’s Angela Willey, who specifically teaches “feminist science.”

"How do scientific agendas…reflect gender normative, racist, heterosexist, classist, and ableist assumptions?” they ask.

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While the book isn’t yet published, the introductory chapter is available online, in which the editors argue in favor of the power that “queer feminist concerns” can have on science.

“In recent decades, science has become a remarkably productive object for queer feminist critical inquiry,” they say, adding that “queer feminist concerns have led us straight to science as a site for both undoing and remaking our worlds.”

In addition to their hopes of using a queer feminist lens to remake knowledge, they also argue for a “queering of science” more generally, saying that doing so can “offer profoundly innovative and different answers to some of academic feminism’s most enduring questions, including: What is sex?”

Similar to other feminist science scholars, they also hope that their feminist perspective will disrupt what is considered “knowledge,” asserting that “queer feminist science studies must concern itself with disrupting the quotidian practices of meaning making that trouble, disrupt, and reconfigure” scientific knowledge.

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The book contains 20 essays on queer feminist topics, including one on “Black Anality,” by Northwestern University professor Jennifer Nash, another on “Pussy Ballistics” by UCLA Professor Rachel Lee,  and another on “What if Culture was Really Nature all Along?” by Vicki Kirby, a professor at the University of New South Wales.

One chapter in the anthology is co-written by Sara Giordano, a professor of feminist science studies at the University of California-Davis who recently published an article calling for people to “challenge the authority of Science” by “rewriting knowledge” through a critical feminist lens.

As Campus Reform reported last week, Giordano’s article also contended that “we need to disrupt the epistemic authority of Science…[and] the assumption that science = truth,” saying this can be done by implementing a “feminist science practice that explicitly unsticks Science from Truth.”

Campus Reform reached out to the editors of Queer Feminist Science: A Reader, for comment, but did not receive any responses despite repeated requests.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @Toni_Airaksinen