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This chapter situates the sex chromosomes within the history of twentieth century theories of sex, gender, and sexuality. The author shows how the X and Y chromosomes, thought of as “sex itself,” came to anchor a conception of sex as a biologically fixed and unalterable binary. The chapter frames the book’s major questions, locating them within scholarship in feminist science studies and social, historical, and philosophical research on the social dimensions of science. The book’s theoretical and methodological innovations, including the concepts of “modeling gender in science,” “gender analysis,” “gender criticality,” and “gender valence,” are introduced and defined.

The Conclusion accounts for the fate of the women whose ideas are examined in this book, and takes stock of the legacies of their sexological work. It further lays out the benefits of pursuing a larger twentieth century history of women’s sexological work, one that is international in its scope and grapples with the rupture in female sexual knowledge production affected by the Second World War and its geopolitical realignments, the reshuffling of the ideological landscapes after 1945, and the rise of new social movements in the 1960s. Finally, the Conclusion argues that the history of women’s sexological work is especially significant at this particular moment in time, as twenty-first century feminist theorists positively embrace science and nature as intellectual and rhetorical resources once again.

The fifth chapter considers the anxious fantasy of life’s withdrawal in contemporary sterility apocalypses. These fantasmatic representations—principally Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men and the science fiction franchise Battlestar Galactica—hinge on the miraculously restored fertility of a woman of color. Ultimately, these works serve to highlight the history of racialized labor and enforced reproduction.

The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.

The first chapter considers the predictively foreclosed temporality through which popular environmentalism gains its sense. It reads the child as a crucial affective and conceptual technology allowing environmentalism to disavow its central insight that matter is mobile. It also looks into and compares the disavowal to feminist new materialist accounts of the queerness of matter.