Politics and Methodology between Science Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, and “Area” Studies

This roundtable asks how politics and methodology operate in interrelations between Science Studies and LGBTQ+ Studies, as well as in conversations with other Area Studies. The panel’s participants engage Women’s, Jewish, German, and Chinese Studies, but we will, together with the audience, be concerned with a range of geography-, language-, ethnicity-, and subjectivities-based Area Studies. We wish to continue the lively debate about queerness in/at HSS conducted during recent meetings by bringing in a further set of interlocutors. Howard Chiang provides perspectives from Chinese Studies, drawing on recent global history of sexual/queer science and on questions of how China’s global empire intersects with the peripherality of gender and sexual expressions. Rebecca Epstein-Levi discusses rhetorical and moral functions of science and medicine from the perspective of Jewish Studies, examining how modern Jewishness is frequently construed as “somehow queer” and underlies claims of Jews’ sexual, and moral, health. Stephanie Dick explores how discussions in the field of Expert Systems de facto reject tacit/embodied/situated knowledges. Drawing on Women’s Studies and feminist epistemology, she discusses political implications of this ideal of disembodied knowledge by asking about the privileges of “those who get to not have bodies.” Heidi Voskuhl’s contribution revolves around engineers’ class anxieties in the industrial age, asking how the development in German/Literary Studies of Critical Theory has helped make visible marginalization and oppression on a large scale, and whether and how this type of “Theory” has enabled political expression in Science Studies, LGBTQ+ Studies, and beyond.