The history of sex research: Is "sex" a useful category?

The history of sex research demonstrates an ongoing coexistence of multiple, conflicting meanings of sex. This history raises questions for scientists about the deployment of a research variable that lacks precision. Cross-disciplinary collaboration between scientists and science and technology studies (STS) scholars offers a way to find solutions to this problem.

Nature, Data, and Power: How Hegemonies Shaped This Special Section.

AbstractSystems of oppression-racism, colonialism, misogyny, cissexism, ableism, heteronormativity, and more-have long shaped the content and practice of science. But opportunities to reckon with these influences are rarely found within academic science, even though such critiques are well developed in the social sciences and humanities. In this special section, we attempt to bring cross-disciplinary conversations among ecology, evolution, behavior, and genetics on the one hand and critical perspectives from the social sciences and humanities on the other into the pages-and in front of the readers-of a scientific journal. In this introduction to the special section, we recount and reflect on the process of running this cross-disciplinary experiment to confront harms done in the name of science and envision alternatives.