For the first part of this two-part interview, visiting scholars Elif Gül and Melina Gioconda Davis sat down to discuss the research projects that brought them to the ZtG, where they share an office. They chat about their interests at the intersection of science, knowledge production, and politics.

Elif: First, let’s start with your project’s title, which is certainly eye-catching: “Sexuality at the End of the World?: Grassroots Sexual Health Collectives and the Rewriting of Sex for Precarious Times.” What is the project about?

Melina: This project examines how queer and trans sexual health collectives in Berlin produce knowledge about sexuality in a moment shaped by growing precarity, especially in relation to the rise of far-right movements in Germany and around the world.

Elif: Can you tell us more about these collectives?

Melina: Berlin has a really rich landscape of grassroots queer and trans collectives creating educational, activist, and health-oriented spaces. Collectives organise workshops, healing modalities, and therapeutic spaces focused on sexuality. Their work ranges from support for survivors of sexual violence to gender transition workshops to sexological bodywork and lots of diverse practices in between.

While most of these groups might not consider themselves “labs” per se, it’s my hunch that through this healing work, they are operating as sorts of labs that create knowledge. For example, they try different approaches, codify new knowledge and best practices and then disseminate their findings.

Elif: That’s really interesting, so that’s the “rewriting sex” part of your title?

Melina: Yes, so that phrase points to my first question: how do queer and trans knowledge practices intervene in, reshape, or build on scientific knowledge about sexuality? Many queer and trans sexual health groups make the critique that a lot of the sexual science canon and contemporary medical approaches, despite some advances, remain pathologizing of queer and trans sexuality. So I’m interested to see how queer and trans groups are rewriting this sexological knowledge from their experience.

Elif: And I imagine that as a scholar trained in science and technology studies, you’re also interested in how this knowledge is both produced by and produces the social?

Melina: Exactly! My second question is about what happens when queer and trans groups start rethinking the body. How might interventions into conventional scientific understandings of sexuality – like scientized notions of sexual orientation, gender, or sexuality itself – lead people to rethink the very identities around which queer movements have traditionally organised? What happens when some ambivalence towards these categories enters social movements? Or, could it be that groups are doubling down on sexological notions of the body, via scientific discourses, and if that’s the case, what influence on activism might that have?

On this question of the social – and how the social influences knowledge-making – I also want to look at how our current political moment, which for many queer and trans people is marked by sense of urgency and anxiety connected to the rise of far-right politics, is having an effect on how we’re thinking about bodies and politics. There’s a palpable feeling of uncertainty in many of our communities, and I think that shapes the kinds of knowledge people are producing.

Elif: I see that you’re trying to connect notions of the body to broader political and organising questions. How do you plan to actually collect this data and draw conclusions?

Melina: It can definitely be a challenge to bring these big, abstract questions into the tangible and practical. My plan for now is to conduct 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork using a multi-method approach. That includes participant observation at workshops, events, and training programmes, as well as interviews with collective members, patients, and other people involved in these broader networks. I’ll also shadow a couple of organisations and grassroots groups in their day-to-day functions.

I want to understand how social factors, ethical concerns, and everyday practices shape knowledge production in these spaces. I’ll also observe how these collectives position themselves within broader social movements. So that means I’ll be accompanying collective members in organising meetings and as they prepare for or positions themselves in relation to different political actions.

Elif: Finally, why are you personally interested in this topic?

Melina: Before starting graduate school at the University of Chicago, I worked as a grassroots bilingual sexuality educator in the US and Mexico for ten years.

Through that work, I moved between grassroots and institutional spaces doing DIY community work, while also taking on work from sexual and gender rights organisations like International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) and different foundations and sexology institutes. I organised community workshops and also participated in English- and Spanish-speaking professional networks of sexuality educators, counsellors, and therapists.

As a queer sex educator, I became really interested in what had effectively become a kind of sex education canon. I wanted to know where that knowledge came from, who produced it, how it circulated, and how it became agreed upon. And of course, what fascinated me most was where grassroots educators, therapists, and practitioners were trying to either push back against a canon or develop new forms of knowledge that they felt better reflected their own experiences or those of their communities.

 

Melina Gioconda Davis (they/elle) is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago, where they are a recipient of the Neubauer Distinguished Fellows Award. They have a background in grassroots community organizing and bilingual sexuality education and their academic interests lie at the intersection of social movements, queer and trans studies, and science and technology studies. They are thrilled to be a visiting scholar at the ZtG.