The Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies
Lecturer
Beans Velocci is a historian of knowledge production in the realms of sex, gender, and sexuality, based in the Department of History and Sociology of Science. Their work uses queer, trans, and feminist methods to interrogate how classification systems become regarded as biological truths, primarily in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States and its colonial and white supremacist context. Their first book project, tentatively titled Binary Logic, is a prehistory of cisness that looks at how sex emerged as a privileged way of sorting bodies not despite but because of its incoherence. Beans holds a PhD and several master's degrees from Yale University, an MA from the University of Utah, and an AB from Smith College.