Invitation to the next Distinguished Lecture Series 12. December 2024: Sex and Gender in the History of the Life Sciences

Professor Staffan Müller-Wille (Cambridge) will give a talk on 

Sex and Gender in the History of the Life Sciences

Abstract: 

Science, technology and medicine are often portrayed as driving forces in the formulation and reinforcement of sex binaries and gender stereotypes based on these. At the same time, recent decades have seen a burgeoning literature on how life scientists, in the past and in the present, have been revealing queer patterns in the formation and variation of sex across all life forms. In this talk, I am going to review the history of understandings of sex and gender from antiquity to the mid-twentieth century. My argument will be that sex, and consequently gender, were always held as fluid categories allowing for endless variations and permutations. It is precisely because of that, however, that they always have been subject to normalizing discourses. Sex variation had to be reigned in, paradoxically, precisely because it seemed normal but not in line with prevailing or aspired norms. 

Staffan Müller-Wille is Professor in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences at the University of Cambridge and holds an Honorary Chair at the University of Lübeck. His research covers the history of the life sciences from the early modern period to the early twentieth century, with a focus on the history of natural history, anthropology, and genetics. Among his publications is a book co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger on The Cultural History of Heredity(2012) and further co-edited collections on Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century (2013), Heredity Explored: Between Public Domain and Experimental Science, 1850–1930 (2016), The Gene in the Postgenomic Era, co-authored with Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (2017), In the Shadow of the Tree: The Diagrammatics of Relatedness in Genealogy, Anthropology, and Genetics as Epistemic, Cultural, and Political Practice, co–authored with Marianne Sommer, Caroline Arni and Simon Teuscher (2024).

The DLS will take place in the IMGWF Lecture Hall Königstr. 42, 23552 Lübeck and online as a Webinar via Webex. More information here.