The history of science is full of queer potential. Reassessing what’s considered natural, interrogating supposedly self-evident ontologies, challenging a split between knowledge and power—these are tasks and commitments often shared by history of science and queer scholars alike. Yet, specifically queer histories of science remain few and far between, and although scholars of gender and sexuality, thanks to Foucault, often look to sexology as a key producer of the sexual subject, few have engaged with the rich theoretical and methodological groundwork laid by scholars in history of science and STS. This panel highlights the possibilities of a fruitful union of these two frameworks in four papers that bring a queer analytic to bear on a variety of topics in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of science, including animal studies, computing, mutation, and ethnology. In imagining queer science broadly—queer actors, queer methods, queer (and anti-queer) uses of science—this panel frames queerness as central to the enterprise of knowledge production both now and in the past, applicable and indeed necessary to consider across a broad range of times, places, and topics, rather than a marginal consideration important only to those working on sexuality. Together, the scholars on this panel will imagine a way forward that bridges and builds on histories of science and queer studies, showing, too, the ways in which the two have been united all along.
