Scientia Sexualis


$49.95

Edited by Jennifer Doyle and Jeanne Vaccaro

11 × 15 inches, 224 pages, softcover
ISBN 978-1-941753-61-3

Design by IN-FO.CO
Co-published by Institute of Contemporary Art, L.A. & Inventory Press

Available for Pre-order
Shipping September 2024

Free USA Shipping


This richly illustrated companion to the ICA LA exhibition Scientia Sexualis features artworks by twenty-six artists whose practices address, dissolve, and reimagine sex and gender within the apparatus of science—past and present. Their works tackle and transform the origins of modern gynecology and its ties to the torture of enslaved women, the pathologization of the sexual body, the entanglement of colonization with sexual violence, and the nonconsensual gendering of trans and intersex people.

Texts by Jennifer Doyle, Eva Hayward, Caroline Ellen Liou, Joan Lubin, Hil Malatino, Amber Jamilla Musser, Amanda Sroka, Jeanne Vaccaro, Leticia Alvarado, KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner), Michelle H. Raheja, Andrea Carlson, and C. Riley Snorton address and situate the exhibition’s visual and performance works within BIPOC, feminist, trans, and queer studies. Examining the difficult history of science as it relates to racialized and gendered assumptions about the sexual body, these visual and textual works challenge our sense of what science is; confront harm produced in the name of science; and offers alternative and radical methods of learning and caring. This publication is made possible with support from Getty through its PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.