sciatrix

There is a class of environmental toxicants that are known for their ‘queer-making’ effects. Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals, or EDCs, produce a wide swath of health issues, including cancers, diabetes, and heart disease that disproportionately impact already marginalized communities (Murphy 2017). Recently, scientists have begun linking EDCs to supposed ‘sexual abnormalities’: stories of gay birds and trans frogs have sounded the alarm on possible impacts to human sex, gender, and sexuality. ‘Queering’ refers to practices of questioning, historicizing and “making strange” often taken for granted categories associated with sex, gender, and sexuality. The following is a bibliography of this literature.

We humans are accustomed to thinking of sexual function as being both fixed and segregated into bodies that we designate as either female or male. In the larger animal kingdom sex doesn’t always follow our rules. Many animals are monoecious, or hermaphroditic, having both male and female sex organs in the same body. Not only that, but lots of animals change from one sex to the other. As in so many aspects of biology, the way humans do sex may be thought of by us as “normal,” but it isn’t necessarily the most interesting way.

Their experiments confirm that sex is pleasurable, even for animals we think of as simple.

All coming-out stories are members of the same genus, if not the same species. Mine, however, has one distinguishing trait: along my path to understanding and accepting that I was gay, the obstacle of my religious upbringing was aided and abetted by none other than Charles Darwin. That is, there was a time when I told myself that the uncomfortable feelings I had for male friends and classmates could not possibly be real, because they would be wrong and sinful, and also because they were impossible in a world shaped by natural selection.

An evolutionary psychology study that gained much media attention in May 2017 claims to show women’s sexual attraction to other women is the outcome of evolution, specifically for the pleasure of heterosexual men. The study was reported widely as ‘homosexual women evolved for men’s pleasure.’ Journalists have not read the study nor linked to it. The study is published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences. The study is led by Associate Professor Menelaos Apostolou. The team is based at the University of Nicosia, with apparently only one woman co-author.

What does it mean to do queer science—or, rather, to do a queer science?