University of Pennslyvania to offer course on ‘Queer Science’
The course will challenge the idea that science can know a person’s biological sex.
Are “bodily truths more real than identity,” the course asks.
University of Pennslyvania students can take a course in the spring 2025 semester that will challenge the idea that science can know a person’s biological sex.
The course is called “Queer Science,” and the university’s Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies and Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies are offering it.
“This course gives students a background in the development of sex science, from evolutionary arguments that racialized sexual dimorphism to the contemporary technologies that claim to be able to get at bodily truths that are supposedly more real than identity,” the course description states.
On the stability of one’s sex, the class “introduces several scholarly and political interventions that have attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science, highlighting ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories.”
“It concludes by asking how to put those interventions into practice when so much of the fight for queer rights, autonomy, and survival has been rooted in categorical recognition by the state, and by considering whether science can be made queer,” it continues.
The course’s professor is Beans Velocci, “a historian of knowledge production in the realms of sex, gender, and sexuality.”
The lecturer’s research is based on “queer, trans, and feminist methods to interrogate how classification systems become regarded as biological truths, primarily in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and its colonial and white supremacist context.”
“Queer Science” fulfill’s the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies mission, which according to its description, “supports pedagogy with gender-inclusive language, an intersectional curriculum, and accessible classroom practices, and invites departments and centers that share these values to collaborate and cross list courses.”
The University of Pennslyvania is not the only Ivy League school to offer a course on “Queer Science.” This fall, Yale University students are asking questions such as “Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer?” and “Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins?” The course is also called “Queer Science.”
Campus Reform contacted the University of Pennslyvania, the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies, and Beans Velocci for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
