Yale University is offering a new course titled "Queer Science" this upcoming fall semester. Ivy League students, who are said to be some of the world's top academic performers, have the opportunity to learn the science behind being queer.
Introductory questions to gauge student interest featured in the course description include: "Can facial recognition technology really tell if you're queer? Why is everyone so obsessed with gay penguins? And how did science come to be the right tool for defining and knowing sex, gender, and sexuality at all?"
Students who enroll in the course will be given 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."
Additionally, the course "introduces 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."
Once the course concludes, students will be asked "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."
Queer Science is being taught by Joanna Radin, an associate professor of history of medicine and history, and Juno Richards, an associate professor of English.
According to Campus Reform, Radin's field of interest includes "feminist, indigenous, and queer STS," while professor Richards has a focus on "queer and trans archives, feminist history, critical legal theory, queer feminist science, feminist disability studies, and human rights laws."
It's unclear how many students, if any, have enrolled in the course.
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