Fighting the Derpy Science of Sexuality.

The word derp has in recent years entered the urban lexicon. Borrowed from the cartoon‘‘South Park,’’it has come to stand in for the phenomenon where‘‘people keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong’’(Krugman, 2015). As researchers working in the feminist studies of science and located in the interdisciplinary fields of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Queer Studies, and Science Studies, we are continually frustrated with derp-logic in science. As Kuhn pointed out well over a half century ago, one of the striking aspects in the history of science is that theories can endure despite accumulating evidence to the contrary. No example better exemplifies this phenomenon than the various sciences of‘‘difference’’—sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality— wherestudies thatclaimevidenceforbiologicaldifferencesbetween two groups often make the cover stories in scientific journals and popular magazines. In-group variation rarely leads to a re-consideration of a priori categories and studies with negative results do not get the same space, in journals or in the press. The last three decades have seen the emergence of the nowburgeoning field of feminist studies of science and technology (FSTS). Among other insights, FSTS has chronicled the long enduring obsession of Western science and societies with biological difference. It is a veritable game of whack-a-mole—no sooner is one claim of biological difference demolished, when another one pops us. Despite vibrant and now increasingly established fields of Women, Gender, and Queer Studies that have developed sophisticated analyses of sex, gender, and sexuality, and despite proliferating queer communities with visible diversity of genders and sexualities, biological research marches on in itsderpyways. van Anders (2015) powerfully demonstrates sexual science’s problematic grounding in a binary sex,gender, sexuality system that is by now widely discredited across and beyondacademicdisciplines.Shechartsandseeks to reconcilea deep chasm between how research on sex, gender, and sexuality is theorized in the biosciences versus other interdisciplinary fields that study sexuality or narratives of sexual identities and experiences. It is in thiscontext thatwereadwithexcitementvanAnders’ recent article. We should begin by saying that we have been and remain fans of van Anders precisely because of the attention she has paid and brought to the incommensurability of these different disciplinary frameworksas theystand, insistinguponimaginingnewscientific paradigms and practices as an important site for queer feminist work. In developing this newtheory, Sexual ConfigurationTheory (SCT), van Anders attempts to expand our understandings of the terms‘‘sex,’’‘‘gender,’’and‘‘sexuality’’to be bothmoreexpansive andmoreprecise.Asscholarswhoalsoworkacross thesefields, butwhoareprimarily locatedinWGSS,wefindmuchtoadmire invanAnders’workandareexcitedbyitspossibilities.Atthesame time,weareuncertain that thesenewdefinitionsandframeworks are adequate to the taskof radically reconceptualizing thefield. Perhapsmoretothepoint,wethinkthevalianteffort tocomplicate sexualityinthebiosciencesdoesimportantworktoshowthelimitationsofsexual science itself.Webeginherewith the innovations thatwethinkthis theorybringsandthen, inthespiritof intellectual engagementanddialog, concludewith what we see as someof the limitations of this reconciliatory approach. The biggest contribution of SCT is in offering resources for sexual science to conceptualize a non-binary world. While this might sound trivial, it is, in fact, a tremendous feat of theoretical andtranslationalbridge-work.Currently,biologicalresearchworks with a binary sex, gender, sexuality system. There are two sexes, two genders, and two sexualities—sex translates into gender and & Banu Subramaniam banu@wost.umass.edu