Timothy Gitzen

Assistant Professor

336.758.5976

gitzent@wfu.edu

Piccolo 112

Cultural/Queer Anthropology

I am an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wake Forest University. Broadly, my research focuses on science and technology studies, microbes and viruses, queer politics and theory, and queer youth sexuality. I have two current projects: one focuses on the knowledge production of scientists and bioartists (artists that use biological materials) working on/with ice and microbes in the Arctic; and the other interrogates contemporary sex panics, security, popular culture, and queer youth sexuality in the United States. The latter project is the subject of my forthcoming book with SUNY Press, Unscripting the Present: The Security Panic of Queer Youth Sexuality.

Arctic ice is melting much quicker than previously predicted, threatening millions. In addition to sea-level rise, climate change promotes the reemergence of ancient viruses and the spread of novel or mutated viruses through new and existing zoonotic vectors. This anthropocentric framing of biosecurity posits microbes as threatening to humans. However, some researchers as well as artists view the discovery of viruses trapped in ice as potential breakthroughs rather than biosecurity concerns Both biological scientists and bioartists are conducting fieldwork and collecting microbial materials in the Arctic and, at times, working together. Their interactions may stimulate discovery and inform a wide public reconceptualization of human capacity.

I suggest that by comparing scientists and bioartists’ fieldwork as a form of knowledge production, we can move away from an anthropocentric biosecurity understanding of microbes and toward productive relations to allay and even reverse climate change. My research project asks: What insights will emerge from the interactions of biological scientists and bioartists? How might their fieldwork practices yield comparable or disparate interpretations of the relationships among humans, microbes, and ice? How might they transform public understanding of climate change? By comparing fieldwork and knowledge-production processes, this project shifts attention away from observing microbes to working with microbes. I contend that their different fieldwork practices—for scientists, observation, measurement, experiments, and data collection; for bioartists, collecting biological materials and documenting environments and materials—will challenge the primacy of anthropocentric framings of climate change found in biosecurity ideologies and practices.

In my book, Unscripting the Present, I demonstrate how contemporary sex panics in the United States are infused with security logics and practices. This results in a future-oriented temporality that works to erase the present experiences of queer youth. How are we to understand the construction of queer youth and their sexualities amidst this “security panic” that labors to anticipate and preempt future uncertainty in the here and now? How do representations of queer youth (sexuality) lay bare the deficiencies of security, the fear of sex panics, and thus challenge security panics in the 21st century?

This book at first argues that contemporary sex panics are best understood as security panics, a discourse and set of practices focused on future uncertainty in need of preemptive action now. Secondly, I contend that this future-oriented temporality of pre-emption ignores the ways queer youth move laterally through the present. This means that rather than adhering to a logic of “growing up,” an adult-oriented security ideology, queer youth are making sideways movements that craft their sexualities through meaningful social relations. I analyze these lateral movements through popular culture narratives of queer youth.

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