Over the past two decades, queer, transgender, and sexuality studies have moved away from the medical model, turning away, as Regina Kunzel puts it, “from the clinic, the couch, and the psychiatric hospital to look instead at histories of sociality, of citizenship, community, culture, politics, the state.” In this special issue, however, we want to return to the sciences of sex, including and beyond the couch, to consider how the surveying and hierarchizing energies of “science” have been put toward the production of understandings of both sexual practice and binary sexual difference, in all of their gendered and racialized dimensions.

Two broadly anthropocene concerns—the ‘human’ condition along with the condition of this human planet, Earth—bear on all discursive practices central to contemporary areas of research in humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Both these concerns reconfigure ways in which humans have come to make sense of themselves and of the world which they share with other forms of life. The anthropocene—ramifications of Cartesian vision of human subject, the giver of meaning, that ultimately subdues all nature and co-existing life-forms—however is challenged by a posthuman turn in the latter half of 20th Century that trenchantly undercuts the foundations of humanism catapulting from the set boundaries established by the ideal of Enlightenment.