ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sapphasaura and the Queer Science of Knowledge Reproduction at the American Museum of Natural History

• In Event: Activist Epistemics and Artefacts 2

English Abstract

In August 1973 a lesbian dinosaur walked the streets of Manhattan. Sapphasaura was 15ft long, 12ft tall, and a stunning shade of lavender. She was shepherded by a group of boisterous women known as Lesbian Feminist Liberation (LFL) en route to the American Museum of Natural History. After placing the dinosaur model on the marble steps the women brandished signs calling for an end to the museum’s “sexist and racist” language and chanted “museum, hire feminists!” A white paper the group delivered to AMNH earlier had outlined mistakes in exhibits that elided matriarchal histories of Indigenous peoples. In response to the institutions silence they constructed Sapphasaura.

This paper takes LFL’s calls, and Sapphasaura, seriously. It proposes a fugitive history of queer and feminist epistemologies at a premier purveyor of public scientific knowledge. I look to the department’s model-making expertise and think with the plaster casts of reptiles and fiberglass amphibians produced in the same year that Sapphasaura danced on the museum’s front steps. Following principal preparator and proud lesbian socialite Frederica Leser and herpetological assistant Carol Townsend, this paper unearths queer sciences of reproduction in the AMNH’s exhibits workshop and herpetology lab. An exhibit on parthenogenic lesbian lizards produced in the wake of Sapphasaura's stand still graces the gallery of Reptile and Amphibian Life. These lizards serve as evidentiary artifacts of activist epistemes at work both on and in the museum.

Leser and Twonsend's labors challenge the binary between knowledge production and reproduction in museum settings. This paper presents an account of work in both the exhibits and herpetology departments in the 1970s to blur the line between scientist and artisan, thinker and worker while positing a fugitive queer history of activist knowledge production.

Author

• Amelia G. Carter, University of Pennsylvania