Yale 'Queer Science' class asks 'Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer?'

Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut is set to host a course this upcoming fall semester that will ask students to focus on “Queer Science.”

Students who enroll in the course are offered introductory questions to gauge their interest in the topic, including questions like: “Can facial recognition technology really tell if you’re queer?” and “Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins?”

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The course states that students who enroll will be given a “background in the development of sex science,” including “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 will also use “scholarly” and “political interventions” as methods to introduce to students how each has “attempted to short-circuit the idea that sex is stable and knowable by science.” 

The course description furthers this concept by stating that it will highlight “ways that queer and queering thinkers have challenged the stability of sexual categories.” 

Led by course instructors Joanna Radin and Juno Richards, the course will also explore “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.”

According to her university biography, Radin’s fields of interest include “feminist, indigenous, and queer STS.” Likewise, Richards’ research “focuses on transnational modernist and postcolonial literature, with a particular emphasis on queer and trans archives, feminist history, critical legal theory, human rights law, citizenship, social reproduction, queer feminist science, biometrics, and feminist disability studies.”

Similar to Yale, Northwestern University is offering a “universal trans rights” course this upcoming fall semester, which will be a part of the university’s “Gender and Sexuality Studies Program.”

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UCLA’s medical school has also recently hired students to write the curriculum for the school’s required “Structural Racism and Health Equity” curriculum, which emphasizes critical race theory and “queer theory.” 

Campus Reform has contacted Yale University for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.