The fields of biology, the humanities and the social sciences were brought together Tuesday and Wednesday nights by Rebecca Jordan-Young.
Jordan-Young is this year's Nancy Schaenen Visiting Scholar at the Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics, brought to campus with help from the Asher Fund of Psychology. On campus, Monday through Friday, Jordan-Young visited many classes and gave two talks, which were open to the campus at large.
Tuesday night's speech, "From Sex Testing of Athletics to Conversion Therapy for Gays: Science, Sexuality and Ethics," took place in the Prindle Auditorium while Wednesday's talk in the Watson Forum was focused on "Sex, Hormones, and Hardwiring: Rethinking Sex in the Brain."
Both talks were well-attended by the DePauw community and both focused on the ways sex, sexuality and gender tie together in a larger way than is possible for any one discipline to entirely explain or understand.
"Usually, sex is over with the scientists, sexuality is maybe more with the social scientist and gender is over with the humanities," said Ann Harris, director of the Women's Studies Program. "We can really think of this event as one of the first concerted attempts to have an interdisciplinary conversation about sex, sexuality and gender."
Jordan-Young began to see these topics in a new light when doing street-based AIDS prevention programs for injection drug users and street-based sex workers.
"In the context of those programs I really learned that sexuality was a whole lot more varied than I knew," she said. "I thought I could kind of recognize gay people and straight people, but what I encountered in that work really blew my mind."
Though her Ph.D. is in socio-medical sciences, Jordan-Young has worked with medical anthropologists specializing in sexuality and gender, as well as those involved in cognitive and developmental neuroscience. She is now an associate professor in the department of Women's Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University's Barnard College.
"In general, the work that I do always combines an interested in reciprocal relationships between science, how science is done and structure of though and structure of power about what makes groups of people different," she said.
Professor of biology Jim Benedix, who attended both Tuesday and Wednesday nights, felt that Jordan-Young succeeded in pulling these many ways of thinking together.
"I was interested in seeing the approach that someone who's truly interdisciplinary takes, since she's sort of in both realms," he said. "So often you have somebody on one side or the other and this is somebody who bridges the gap and actually interacts with people on both sides."
Harris gained two important concepts from this interdisciplinary discussion.
Jordan-Young focused much of her two talks on the framework of the questions that are asked when discussing sexuality and identification.
"The framework of questioning is just as important as the content you're after," Harris said, of her take on the subject.
Harris also felt that Jordan-Young's discussion of these topics shifted the viewpoint through which understanding sex, sexuality and gender should be viewed. Rather than "causes and origins," Harris feels that Jordan-Young is examining "permutation and changes."