Queer Elements

Abstract

Queerness in recent scholarship has exceeded identities and human sexual behaviors to now include ecologies (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erikson 2010; Seymour 2013), animals (Govindrajan 2018; Hayward 2010), and elements (Agard-Jones 2012; Roberts 2017; Zee 2017). Meanwhile, feminist and queer scholarship within STS continues to expand ideas of kinship, reproduction, gender, and sexuality (Clark and Haraway 2018; Thompson 2005; Willey 2016). Inspired by works on queer entanglements with and beyond human bodies such as poet Tamiko Beyer’s (2013) We Come Elemental and feminist STS scholars Cyd Cipola et. Al’s (2017) Queer Feminist Science Studies: A Reader, this open panel asks, what does attention to queer forms and queer critiques bring to STS? When queerness signifies subversive sexual practices or transgressively sensual corporealities and when queerness no longer necessarily centers human experience, what is lost or gained? The panel invites papers that engage queerness as expressed through wildly diverse bodily forms and relations.

Individual Presentations

• How Informatics Propagates the Informatics of Domination - Jess Tran, McGill University

• Queer Experiments and Chemical Intimacies: HIV Prophylactics in and around Bangkok - Tim Quinn, Rice University, Department of Anthropology

• The Queerness of Not-Quite Parrots - Jean M Langford, Univ. Minnesota

Session Organizer

• Juno Salazar Parrenas, The Ohio State University