Catherine Clune-Taylor

Catherine Clune-Taylor, PhD (she/her) is a critical, interdisciplinary, and intersectionally feminist science and technology studies scholar. Most broadly, she is interested in the ways in which science (and other systems of knowledge production) function together with practices and institutions to shape the possibilities for life and death available to individuals, particularly as members of marginalized groups. She is known for her in-depth analyses of the science and medicine of sex, gender, and sexual difference drawing on her training in feminist theory, philosophy of science, bioethics and the biomedical sciences. Her first book Securing Autonomously Gendered Futures: A Feminist Philosophical Defense of Intersex and Trans Kids is under contract with Duke University Press. She has published articles in on the medical management of intersex conditions in children in Hypatia and Bioethics and is the author of the chapter “Is Sex Socially Constructed?” in the Routledge Handbook on Feminist Philosophy of Science.

While at the Newhouse Center, Clune-Taylor will work on her second book project Eugenics and the Biopolitical Paradox of Whiteness: Whiteness as a Health Risk for All. This project explores the construction of Whiteness within the United States, specifically as a form or type of life under biopower. It aims at revealing the ways in which this historically constituted, idealized, developmental form of life—as well as the traits, expectations, entitlements, and fantasies with which it has come to identify and define itself—results in increased risks of death and disability for everyone, regardless of race.