Sex, science, and the forms of defiance

The contemporary art exhibition Scientia Sexualis (October 2024-March 2025 at ICA LA) brought together work by over two dozen artists to consider how, as sexual subjects, we are made and unmade by disciplines like psychiatry, sexology, anthropology, and reproductive medicine. This project, now embodied by the exhibition’s catalog, offers an alternative access point to the history of science where sex, gender, and pleasure are concerned. As curators, our aim was to constellate artworks addressing and holding diverse political and historical situations in their forms, textures, and in their approaches to the archives mapping often painful histories. The exhibition thus charts trans, Black feminist, Indigenous, disabled, and queer tactics of survival. With this call, we aim to deepen this project’s confrontation with the frameworks that purport to tell us not only what sex and gender are, but what a body is and can be, and, in fact, who gets to be at all.

We invite artists and scholars working in this space to share their tactical work unraveling the segregationist logics of race and sex that structure what Maria Lugones described as “the coloniality of gender.” We are interested in practices which generate transversal lines of solidarity and/or open up new avenues for the feeling and expression of pleasure. We are interested in creative, archival, curatorial and theoretical projects. We are most interested in artists thinking with material and archives, and scholars thinking deeply with the practices of artists who do so.