Before sexologists taxonomized human sexual differences, studies of non-human animals served as an important site for explorations of the meaning and manifestation of sex. But if scientists looked to the animal world for evidence that a clear distinction between male and female was the norm, they didn't find it. Exceptional specimens filled the pages of scientific journals and popular science magazines—neuter bees, ambiguously sexed hyenas, and sterile cattle, among others, formed a seemingly endless parade of nature’s departure from a coherent sexual classification scheme. Yet, even as scientists encountered sexual variations that didn't map neatly onto binary categories, they staked their claims to expertise on their ability to identify bodily truths and create coherent taxonomies out of them. The logic that undergirded the pathologization of certain forms of sex was one of expertise, not internal consistency. By focusing on ambiguity rather than crystallization, my project shifts the history of the production of sexual categories away from a hegemonic disciplining of difference and towards a contingent and contentious process of aspirational knowledge production that never quite achieved its goals. 


 

 


 

 
Naomi Mitchison co-authored her first, and only, scientific paper in 1915 with her brother JBS Haldane. In her memoirs, Mitchison describes feeling pushed out of science because she was more interested in the behavior and personality of her subjects than their genes. She went on to pursue a lauded career as a writer and activist and later used fiction to reclaim the scientific realm denied in her youth. In her science fiction novel Memoirs of a Spacewoman, published in 1962, Mitchison imagines research on animal behavior free from both the boundaries of Earth and the strict scientific culture she experienced. Mitchison created species that contravened pre-conceived notions of sex, sexuality, and motherhood. Her protagonist uses research methods of communication that embrace extreme empathy, erase the barriers between a scientist and their study system and thereby breaks the rules separating observer and observed. Memoirs of a Spacewoman can be embraced as a queer text that agitates the dominant scientific enterprise, shows that the scientific definitions and perspectives on sex are limited and inadequate, and explores alternative methods to science.
 

Our modern ideas of biological mutation date back to 1901, with the creation of a "mutation theory" that held that new species could arise from parent species in the space of one generation, in a sudden evolutionary jump. The first organism thought to provide evidence for this view, an evening primrose, was later discovered to have chromosomes demonstrating unusual behavior--they would link up in rings rather than pair two by two. The validity of the mutation theory came into question as this behavior was labeled a "degenerate" form of reproduction, "subsexual" or even "queer." Intriguingly enough, however, the same sorts of terms might well have been applied to the men who studied this plant, and who defended its reproductive peculiarities as novel and productive modes with great evolutionary potential. How can knowing the intriguing details of the private lives of these scientists aid a historical investigation of cytogenetics in the early twentieth century? Is the ability to recognize the reproductive value of novel mutants created by queer chromosomal dynamics related to the private lives of those doing the studying and explaining? In other words, is there a connection between the mutant gaze--and the mutant gays? In this talk I will explore the possibility of using sexuality as an analytical lens in the history of science, and will suggest that not only did this plant disrupt assumptions of sexual behavior--it might even be seen as challenging our categories of "sex" and "species" altogether.

Omaha ethnologist Francis La Flesche (FLF) has been remembered either as an unsuccessful supporter of the settler project or a misunderstood subversive social scientist. Before his appointment with the U.S. Bureau of Ethnology in 1910, FLF worked for three decades with ethnologist and allotment agent Alice Fletcher as a native informant, an epistemic tool whose gender, age, and subjectivity were rendered mutable. As the first Indigenous professional ethnologist, FLF studied the Osage nation extensively, but his scholarship and artifact collections were deemed “incomprehensible” and pedantic. His published works relied on Osage categories, lacked legible theoretical contributions, and his collections were undisplayable. Even FLF’s professional presence was evidence of the failure of the inner logics of his field, which presupposed his destined vanishing. In this paper, I challenge this historical narrative in which one can only resist or collude with cis-heteronormative colonial sciences. I read FLF’s failure, the fact that he was never quite the
proper subject of settler scientific knowledge production, as part of the making of Indigenous ethnology. Using J. Halberstam’s construction of queer failure, in which failure “exploits the unpredictability of ideology” and “recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant,” I argue that this never-quite-ness was not just an absence of authority, but a Native scientific position. Using a queer interpretive lens, I explore FLF’s published works and personal correspondence relating to salvage, and question settler-normativity in the study of Native science— the epistemic production of the objects and tools of settler science.