Catherine Clune-Taylor (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton University, and is the first tenure-track hire, as well as the first person of color to be appointed in GSS in the history of the Program. She is a critical, interdisciplinary, and intersectionally feminist science and technology studies scholar with formal training in both philosophy and in the biomedical sciences. Specifically, in addition to a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Alberta, Clune-Taylor also holds a bachelor of medical science in immunology and microbiology, a bachelor of arts in philosophy and a master of arts in philosophy, all from the University of Western Ontario.
Most broadly, Clune-Taylor’s work explores the ways in which science (and other systems of knowledge production) function together with practices, technologies, and institutions to shape the possibilities for living and dying available to individuals as members of marginalized groups. She is known in particular for her in-depth, critical feminist analysis of the science of sex, gender, and sexual difference, as well as of the ethics and biopolitics of all medical efforts to secure cisgendered futures for minors unable to provide informed consent. This includes both the medical management of intersex conditions, and the treatment of trans kids with so-called “conversion therapies.”
Clune-Taylor’s articles have appeared in Hypatia, Bioethics, The American Journal of Public Health, Cell, and American Scientist, and she is the author of the chapter “Is Sex Socially Constructed?” in The Routledge Handbook on Feminist Philosophy of Science (2020). Her book Securing Autonomously Gendered Futures: A Feminist Philosophical Defense of Intersex and Trans Kids is under contract with Duke University Press, and she is currently at work at work on two additional monograph length projects titled Eugenics and the Biopolitical Paradoxes of Whiteness: Whiteness as a Health Risk for All, and The Matter of Black Life and Death: Race, Biopolitics and Health Insurance in America.
Clune-Taylor is Vice President of the board of directors for intersex activist organization InterACT: Advocates for Intersex Youth and is the George H. and Mildred F. Whitfield Preceptor in the Humanities at Princeton University from 2024-2027. She is also a Faculty Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. With her colleague, Prof. M.J. Crockett, Clune-Taylor co-organizes the Future Values Initiative and its fellowship program.
