Beans Velocci Keynote Address

Beams Aimed Directly at the Reproductive Organs: Radiation, Gonads, and Trans Mutations in the Cold War

Beans Velocci, assistant professor in History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

American Cold War radiation biologists were obsessed with gonads. Testes and ovaries, containing the genetic heritage and future of humanity, were at constant risk of bombardment by the invisible emanations of x-ray machines, fallout, and nuclear reactors, and as such occupied a central place in studies of the biological effects of radiation. As the scientists tasked with figuring out the impact of radiation on the human body drew on their collective backgrounds in eugenic science, gonads came to serve as the locus of threats to heredity in the far future, holding within them the literal seeds of the downfall of civilization as accumulating mutations diminished human vitality. This talk stituates 1950s nuclear anxieties about gonads in the context of the coeval public transition of Christine Jorgensen—herself routinely compared to an atomic bomb—and proposes the juxtaposition of atomic and trans history as a new way to understand the reconstitution of sex in the mid-twentieth century.

Speaker's Bio

Beans Velocci is an assistant professor in History and Sociology of Science and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Their work uses queer, trans, and feminist methods to interrogate classification systems and how they become regarded as biological truths. They recently published their first book, Sex Isn't Real: The Invention of an Incoherent Binary (Duke University Press, 2026), and they are working on two new projects—one, tentatively titled The Survival of Man: Nuclear Planning and the Future of Sex, that looks at anxieties about post-nuclear war reproduction and repopulation, and the other, as yet untitled, on the STS scholar Leigh Star and lesbian feminist critiques of science. Beans' other work can be found in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, the American Naturalist, and Cell, among others.

This keynote address kickstarts the Society for the Humanities Fall Fellows' Conference on Survival. You can find out more details about the conference here: https://events.cornell.edu/event/survival-conference