The Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program and the Alice Paul Center
are pleased to present the 2012 R. Jean Brownlee lecture in Sexuality
Studies:

"Sexual Health as Buzzword: Competing Stakes and Proliferating Agendas"

Speaker: Steven Epstein, Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University

Sexual health is one of the great buzzwords of the early twenty-first
century. The recent, exponential growth of discourses, practices,
techniques, and industries that reference or profess the goal of sexual
health marks a new moment in the history of engagement by health
institutions with the domain of sexuality. At the same time, the convergence
around the specific term masks a remarkable diversity of scientific,
political, economic, and practical agendas which sometimes coexist and at
other times directly compete. I seek to understand the contexts in which the
term has arisen, the consequences of attempts to lay claim to it, the kinds
of bodies and embodied subjectivity that are linked to its uses, and its
implications for what we imagine sexuality to be.

Bio:
Professor Epstein is the director of the Science in Human Culture Program
and of the interdisciplinary graduate cluster in Science Studies; a faculty
member at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities; a faculty affiliate
in the Gender Studies program; and a faculty associate in Cells to Society
(C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health at the Institute for
Policy Research. He is also a co-convener of The Sexualities Project at
Northwestern. Before joining the Northwestern faculty in 2009, Epstein spent
the preceding 15 years on the faculty at the University of California, San
Diego.



Professor Epstein studies the contested production of knowledge, 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. Most recently, he is a co-editor of Three Shots
at Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine's Simple
Solutions (Johns Hopkins, 2010). 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 also coauthored
Learning by Heart: AIDS and Schoolchildren in America's Communities
(Rutgers, 1989). Epstein has published in such journals as Social Studies of
Science, Body & Society, Sociological Forum, Theory and Society, and
Sexualities.



Epstein is involved in several ongoing research projects. He is studying the
relationship between sexuality and biomedicine by examining the multiple
social worlds that promote notions of sexual health. Following on his recent
work on the politics of HPV vaccination, he is studying the impact of gender
and sexual politics on understandings of various types of cancer. He is also
a collaborator on a study of "sexual citizenship" among gay Mexican
immigrants to the United States.