GENDER & SEXUALITY STUDIES PROGRAM

Steven Epstein is a faculty affiliate in the Gender & Sexuality Studies program and is a co-founder of the Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN). He studies the "politics of knowledge"—more specifically, the contested production of expert and especially biomedical knowledge, with an emphasis on the interplay of social movements, experts, and health institutions, and with a focus on the politics of sexuality, gender, and race. He is especially known for two books: Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago, 2007), which received multiple awards, including the American Sociological Association’s Distinguished Book Award; and Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California, 1996), which also received multiple awards, including the C. Wright Mills Prize. He is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, residency fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a total of eight book prizes. His work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Epstein’s newest book, The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2022. The book analyzes the rise, proliferation, uptake, and sprawling consequences of sexual health activities. Conjoining “sexual” with “health” changes both terms: it alters how we conceive of sexuality but also transforms what it means to be healthy, prompting new expectations of what medicine can provide. The book provides critical tools to assess a range of potential consequences of the investment in sexual health and to consider how those consequences vary across groups and identities. By exploring debates about the defining of normality, the roles of experts of different sorts, and the relative emphases placed on risk and pleasure when considering sexual matters, it seeks to identify pathways that promote pleasure, equality, and social justice.

At Northwestern, Epstein is also affiliated with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Science in Human Culture Program, the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing , and the Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health at the Institute for Policy Research.

Publications

• The Quest for Sexual Health: How an Elusive Ideal Has Transformed Science, Politics, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).
• “Sexual Health beyond the Buzzword: The Turn to Social Justice.” Forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook on Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights, ed. Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Carmen Logie, and Christy Newman, and Richard Parker. London: Routledge.
• “The Elusive Goal of Sexual Health.” Pp. 382-91 in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies, 4th Edition, ed. Nancy L. Fischer and Laurel Westbrook. London: Routledge, 2022.
• “Cultivated Co-Production: Sexual Health, Human Rights, and the Revision of the ICD.” Social Studies of Science 51, no. 5 (2021): 657-682.
  
• “Governing Sexual Health: Bridging Biocitizenship and Sexual Citizenship.” Pp. 21-50 in Kelly Happe, Jenell Johnson, and Marina Levina (eds.), Biocitizenship: The Politics of Bodies, Governance, and Power (New York: NYU Press, 2018).
• “The Proliferation of Sexual Health: Diverse Social Problems and the Legitimation of Sexuality” (with Laura Mamo).  Social Science & Medicine 188 (2017): 176-190.
•  “The New Sexual Politics of Cancer: Oncoviruses, Disease Prevention, and Sexual Health Promotion” (with Laura Mamo). Biosocieties, online 16 May 2016 at doi:10.1057/biosoc.2016.10.
• “‘For Men Arousal Is Orientation’: Bodily Truthing, Technosexual Scripts, and the Materialization of Sexualities through the Phallometric Test” (with Tom Waidzunas) Social Studies of Science 45, no. 2 (2015): 187-213.
• “Immigrant Sexual Citizenship: Intersectional Templates among Mexican Gay Immigrants to the United States” (with Héctor Carrillo). Citizenship Studies 18, no. 3/4 (2014): 259-276.
• “The Pharmaceuticalization of Sexual Risk: Vaccine Development and the New Politics of Cancer Prevention” (with Laura Mamo). Social Science & Medicine 101 (2013): 155-165.
• Three Shots at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions (Johns Hopkins, 2010), co-editor.
• Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (Chicago, 2007).
• Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (California, 1996).
• Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America’s Communities (Rutgers, 1989).

Courses Taught

• “Race/Gender/Sex & Science: Making Identities and Differences”