Angela Willey

Biopossibility: A Queer Feminist Materialist Science Studies Manifesto, with Special Reference to the Question of Monogamous Behavior

This essay is a speculative exploration into the uses of a materialism grounded in the epistemological interventions of feminist and postcolonial science studies and queer historicizations of sexuality. It is also a meditation on the materialist turn in feminist theory from a critical science studies perspective. It offers a creative approach to the materiality of embodiment, an approach that is critically alert to the ways in which scientific disciplinary ways of knowing have been constructed as less mediated access to that materiality than humanistic ones. Rather than turning to a materialist genealogy that suggests the importance of science, this essay turns to a genealogy grounded in a queer, feminist, and antiracist vision of the vital body as a source of knowledge and resistance. Reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power” as a biology of the erotic to decenter assumptions about sexuality and human nature that shape the field of gene-brain-behavior research on affiliative behavior in general and on monogamy in particular, the essay elaborates a theory of biopossibility. It offers this notion of biopossibility—the complexly mediated capacity to embody certain socially salient traits and differences—as a frame for a queer feminist materialist science studies approach.

A World of Materialisms: Postcolonial Feminist Science Studies and the New Natural

Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The citational practices of many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies.

Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality.

The word derp has in recent years entered the urban lexicon. Borrowed from the cartoon‘‘South Park,’’it has come to stand in for the phenomenon where‘‘people keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong’’(Krugman, 2015). As researchers working in the feminist studies of science and located in the interdisciplinary fields of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Science Studies, we are continually frustrated with derp-logic in science. As Kuhn pointed out well over a half century ago, one of the striking aspects in the history of science is that theories can endure despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. No example better exemplifies this phenomenon than the various sciences of‘‘difference’’—sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality— wherestudies thatclaimevidenceforbiologicaldifferencesbetween two groups often make the cover stories in scientific journals and popular magazines. In-group variation rarely leads to a re-consideration of a priori categories and studies with negative results do not get the same space, in journals or in the press. The last three decades have seen the emergence of the nowburgeoning field of feminist studies of science and technology (FSTS). Among other insights, FSTS has chronicled the long enduring obsession of Western science and societies with biological difference. It is a veritable game of whack-a-mole—no sooner is one claim of biological difference demolished, when another one pops us. Despite vibrant and now increasingly established fields of Women, Gender, and Queer Studies that have developed sophisticated analyses of sex, gender, and sexuality, and despite proliferating queer communities with visible diversity of genders and sexualities, biological research marches on in itsderpyways. van Anders (2015) powerfully demonstrates sexual science’s problematic grounding in a binary sex,gender, sexuality system that is by now widely discredited across and beyondacademicdisciplines.Shechartsandseeks to reconcilea deep chasm between how research on sex, gender, and sexuality is theorized in the biosciences versus other interdisciplinary fields that study sexuality or narratives of sexual identities and experiences. It is in thiscontext thatwereadwithexcitementvanAnders’ recent article. We should begin by saying that we have been and remain fans of van Anders precisely because of the attention she has paid and brought to the incommensurability of these different disciplinary frameworksas theystand, insistinguponimaginingnewscientific paradigms and practices as an important site for queer feminist work. In developing this newtheory, Sexual ConfigurationTheory (SCT), van Anders attempts to expand our understandings of the terms‘‘sex,’’‘‘gender,’’and‘‘sexuality’’to be bothmoreexpansive andmoreprecise.Asscholarswhoalsoworkacross thesefields, butwhoareprimarily locatedinWGSS,wefindmuchtoadmire invanAnders’workandareexcitedbyitspossibilities.Atthesame time,weareuncertain that thesenewdefinitionsandframeworks are adequate to the taskof radically reconceptualizing thefield. Perhapsmoretothepoint,wethinkthevalianteffort tocomplicate sexualityinthebiosciencesdoesimportantworktoshowthelimitationsofsexual science itself.Webeginherewith the innovations thatwethinkthis theorybringsandthen, inthespiritof intellectual engagementanddialog, concludewith what we see as someof the limitations of this reconciliatory approach. The biggest contribution of SCT is in offering resources for sexual science to conceptualize a non-binary world. While this might sound trivial, it is, in fact, a tremendous feat of theoretical andtranslationalbridge-work.Currently,biologicalresearchworks with a binary sex, gender, sexuality system. There are two sexes, two genders, and two sexualities—sex translates into gender and & Banu Subramaniam banu@wost.umass.edu

The Mating Life of Geeks: Love, Neuroscience, and the New Autistic Subject

In this article, we track the emergence of a new autistic subject, one that is socially inept yet brilliant, earnest yet charming, obsessive yet humorous, arrogant yet vulnerable, and unquestionably worthy of our attention. In contrast to the historic definition of the autist as one lacking the capacity for love, the new autistic subject is enabled and inflected by the gendered construction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and holds the promise of being potentially productive and even (desirably) reproductive. Through an analysis of current trends in autism science (extreme male brains and assortative mating) and shifting narratives about autism and love, we trace how processes of heterosexualization inform the shift from loveless to loving and lovable, and we further explore how such processes produce new forms of exclusions in the name of neurodiversity. We locate ASD as a site for the reinscription and biologization of historical ideas about gender as well as the naturalization of normative heterosexuality. Finally, we argue that it is through this process of normalization via heterosexualization that this new subject emerges, leaving many lost to the queer, to the feminine, or to the irredeemably abject.

Constituting compulsory monogamy: normative femininity at the limits of imagination

Feminists have coined the term ‘compulsory monogamy’ to describe the deeply normalised status of coupling, especially for women. To say that monogamy is compulsory is to call attention to constraints on our ability to imagine alternatives. The visibility of alternative relationship models can challenge monogamys grip on our imaginations, but it can also reinforce its status. This paper explores how normative femininity functions to code monogamous and non-monogamous possibilities as desirable and undesirable, respectively. While both are possible, monogamy is reinforced as healthy adult sexuality – for women and men – through the policing of femininity. The paper grounds this discussion in a reading of a film – Two Girls and a Guy – in which the possibility of a non-dyadic relationship is on the table and at the same time rendered implausible. The analysis has implications both for further unpacking cultural investments in coupling and for resisting compulsory monogamy.

Foreword: Biology/embodiment/desire

ABSTRACT The sexological roots of “lesbian” and the “queer” turn from biologized categories of sexual difference pose an exciting set of questions and tensions for thinking about queer feminism and biological meanings. This issue seeks to open space to explore how we might reconcile assumptions about “female same-sex sexuality” that often accompany “lesbian” with queer and trans-feminist treatments of science, embodiment, and desiring, while at the same time insisting on the importance of an undertheorized dyke legacy for thinking the at-once material and political nature of sexuality.

Rethinking monogamy's nature: From the truth of non/monogamy to a dyke ethics of “antimonogamy”

ABSTRACT Following Lynne Huffers work on queer feminism, this abridged essay centers the figure of the lesbian in order to develop a dyke ethics that engenders nuanced thinking about both monogamy and embodiment. The essay reads Alison Bechdels comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, to elaborate a “dyke ethics of anti-monogamy.” Grounded in notions of friendship, community, and social justice, this ethics decenters the sexual dyad in a way that polyamory does not. It also insists upon a theoretical and ethical disposition of respect for the simultaneously political and embodied nature of desire. In so doing, it offers first a way of re-thinking the story of monogamys nature as a naturecultural tale about mononormative desire and further places that desire in a field of relationality that renders its significance as a feature of humanness and an object of scientific inquiry strange.