Research

Feminist & Queer Science

All our work is conducted using a feminist science lens, meaning that attending to inequities related to gender and intersecting identities is fundamental to our research projects. We also situate our work within a queer science approach, meaning that we see our work as expanding, opening, and transforming possibilities, categories, and understandings about intimacies, gender/sex, and biologies in plural ways. Feminist and queer science happens at all levels, from lab meetings to writing papers, from theory to method, and more. Some of our work is explicitly about feminist/queer science methodologies, while some of our work is built upon a feminist/queer science framework.

For more on feminist and queer science, look around the internets and also see Gap Junction Science, a feminist science site.

For feminist/queer science specifically in the van Anders lab, see the following interviews:

• Trang K, 2014. Mapping out a feminist bioscience: Interview with Sari van Anders, Parts 1 & 2. The Neuroethics Blog.
• Bowers, M. (2014). Doing Feminist Science/Feminists Doing Science: An interview with Dr. Sari van Anders, Founder of Gap Junction Science Parts I & 2. The Neuroethics Blog.
• Gupta K, 2012. Doing Neuroscience, Doing Feminism: Interview with Dr. Sari van Anders. The Neuroethics Blog.

Gender/Sex

We use the concept of "gender/sex" (van Anders & Dunn, 2009; van Anders, 2015; van Anders, in press) to refer to phenomena, features, and whole people where gender and sex intertwine, could both be relevant, and/or the two cannot be disentangled easily or at all. Typically, human biology focuses on sex (femaleness, maleness, maybe sex-diversity) while sociocultural research focuses on gender (femininity, masculinity, maybe gender-diversity). Gender/sex expresses a more empirically accurate entanglement in queer and scientific terms. We ground our work on gender/sex in "Sexual Configurations Theory", in part, which Dr. van Anders developed to help conceptualize this and other phenomena, and provide innovative, inclusive, feminist, queer, and scientifically meaningful ways of measuring and addressing gender/sex.

Sexual Diversity

Our research focuses on sexuality broadly understood, and we attend to individuals from sexual majority and sexual minority groups. To do so, we aim to avoid (further) marginalizing those from minoritized groups. We are interested in a host of sexual and relational diversity, including gender/sex sexualities (e.g., LGB & heterosexuality) and partner number sexualities (e.g., polyamory, monosexuality, asexuality).

A major thrust of this work involves "Sexual Configurations Theory" (SCT; van Anders, 2015). Our goal with SCT is to conceptualize and model diverse gender/sexes and partnered sexualities that are built from lived experiences (especially on the sexual margins) and relevant to people's lives. To do so, we crafted our award-winning interdisciplinary framework in ways that incorporate feminist/queer scholarship and bioscience. SCT addresses gender/sex sexuality and partner number sexuality, solitary and partnered sexuality, eroticism and nurturance, as well as branchedness and coincidence. It uses what we call a "sexual diversity lens" to do so. We have developed materials about SCT to make it more accessible to people, including researchers, clinicians, and educators.

Sexuality

Our research in sexuality involves in-depth explorations of various sexual phenomena, like cuddling, orgasm, fantasy, solitary sexuality, arousal, thoughts, visual stimuli, jealousy, and desire. Sometimes sometimes our research focuses only on the sexual phenomena themselves; other times, we examine how these phenomena are linked to, or modulate, testosterone and other hormones (as based in the S/P Theory). Some of our main interests include multifaceted sexual desire, and how desire can be experienced in different ways - not just amounts - by different people or at different times. This helps us understand desire as well as hormone-desire links. We are also interested in understanding how culture, gender norms, and physiology mutually or exclusively relate to sexuality, including how some aspects of sexuality widely assumed to be hormonal might actually be better understood with or alongside a sociocultural lens. Much of our newer work is rooted in our "Heteronormativity Theory of Low Sexual Desire in Women Partnered with Men", which articulates that heteronormativity (inequitable gender roles tied to expectations of heterosexuality) might actually better account for low desire in women than other accounts that define it as a problem, and one that resides within women, and especially their bodies.

Social Neuroendocrinology

What might bioscience, built with feminist and queer commitments from the ground up, look like? One of our main contributions is to social neuroendocrinology, a field we helped kick-start in 2006 (van Anders & Watson, 2006). Social neuroendocrinology is the study of hormones-behaviour associations in social context. This attends to people as socially located instead of interchangeable bodies. It also attends to behaviours as multifaceted and socially situated rather than unitary and universal actions. And, we explore evolutionary processes (in humans) as cross-species and human-specific when appropriate. Social neuroendocrinology not only reverses the arrow of causality (from just hormones -> behavior to, additionally, behavior -> hormones) but provides models for studying iterative, recursive, and dynamic associations between hormones and behavior in whole people who reflect evolutionary and socially constructed processes.

Our research helps to provide ways to do socially situated science that are biologically expansive (not reductionist), biolegible (i.e., to other bioscientists), and informed by lived experiences (critically reflective narratives of the minoritized and marginalized).

We focus on social modulation of testosterone. Our work explores the social phenomenology of testosterone (what is its evolved social function?) as well as behavioural contexts tied to intimacy, sexuality, nurturance, and partnering/pair bonding. We are aso interested in the sequelae (effects) of socially modulated hormones, including on health and immunity.

We ask hormonal questions that have both evolution and social construction in their answers. To do so, we developed the award-winning Steroid/Peptide Theory of Social Bonds (S/P Theory; van Anders et al., 2011). This highlights how testosterone is linked, not to maleness/masculinity, but to competition and nurturance regardless of gender/sex. The S/P Theory is not post-gender though: gender constrains and influences how competition (acquiring or defending resources, e.g., status, sexual opportunities, power) and nurturance (warm, supporting, and/or loving contact with others, e.g., partners, children, pets) are experienced, as do a host of intersecting identities.