Scientia Sexualis
Scientia Sexualis is an ambitious group survey of contemporary artists whose works take up the fraught relationship between sex, gender, and science. Organized by Jennifer Doyle (Professor of English, University of California, Riverside) and Jeanne Vaccaro (Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies, University of Kansas), the exhibition is realized as part of the ambitious collaboration across arts institutions throughout Southern California known as PST ART: Art & Science Collide led by the Getty.
Scientia Sexualis centers research-driven interventions into raced and gendered assumptions that structure scientific disciplines governing our sense of the sexual body. The artists in this exhibition bring attention to the material, conceptual, and psychic forms of the lab and the clinic as aesthetics that operate across scientific and artistic discourses. Together with the catalogue and related programming, Scientia Sexualis aims to examine and reconfigure the relationship between art and science and, in turn, to create an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned.
Scientia Sexualis takes its title from Michel Foucault’s landmark text, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976), in which Foucault describes the nineteenth-century development of a “scientia sexualis”—the clinical pursuit of a “uniform truth of sex” as evidenced by an endless scanning of the body and a relentless cataloging of sexual types and deviations …
Jennifer Doyle holds a Ph.D from Duke University and is Professor of English at University of California, Riverside. She is a queer theorist, art critic, and sportswriter whose research focuses on art, sport, artist engagement with medical history, and artist collaboration with laboratory sciences. She is the author of Shadow of My Shadow (Duke University Press, 2024); Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire (University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art (Duke University Press, 2013); and Campus Sex/Campus Security (Semiotext(e), 2015). From 2015–2017, she curated a series of feminist performances for The Broad Museum, “Tip of Her Tongue.” She also organized Nao Bustamante: Soldadera for the Vincent Price Art Museum (2015) and I Feel Different (2009–10) for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Doyle is a member of the Board of Directors for Human Resources Los Angeles. She is the recipient of an Arts Writers Grant and was the 2013–2014 Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts, London.
Jeanne Vaccaro is a scholar and curator whose writing and social practice trace the idiosyncrasies of the archive to activate liberation histories and coalitions. She holds a Ph.D in Performance Studies from New York University and is Assistant Professor of Transgender Studies and Museum Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a research fellow at the Kinsey Institute and inaugural scholar-curator at the ONE Archives. She curated Foucault on Acid, with paintings by Grace Rosario (2021), and nothing lower than I, with sculptures by Xandra Ibarra (2022). She also organized Bring Your Own Body: transgender between archives and aesthetics for Cooper Union (2015). Her scholarly writing is published in GLQ, the Journal of Modern Craft, Radical History Review, Social Text, TSQ, and Trap Door, and her forthcoming book Handmade: feelings and textures of transgender, was awarded the Arts Writers Grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation. She is co-founder of the NYC Trans Oral History Project, a community archive partnership with the New York Public Library.
