In this talk, Dr Ross Brooks (he/him) will give us a sneak preview (and perhaps even a covert cover reveal!) of his forthcoming book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life, to be published by Yale University Press next August. Perceptions of Darwin’s sexological ideas and legacy have long been clouded by simplistic accounts of his theory of sexual selection: competitive males and coy females perpetuating species. Digging deeper, Ross will outline some of Darwin’s encounters with queer creatures and how they continually modified his thinking about the origins and evolution of sex, leading him to the startling conclusion, ‘Every man & woman is hermaphrodite.’ Intersex fish species, seahorse dads, gynandromorph butterflies, a hen-feathered cockerel named Hector. All queered Darwin’s evolutionary sexology in ways that have hitherto been little appreciated, obscured by his dogmatic devotion to Victorian gender and sexual mores.

Dr Brooks is an Associate Lecturer in history at Oxford Brookes University and curator of the Queer Oxford project (queeroxford.info). He has been integral in originating queer perspectives on the history of evolutionary biology and his reappraisal of Charles Darwin’s sexological science has been especially influential. Ross appears in the pioneering nature documentary Queer Planet which premiered in the UK on Sky Nature in November 2023. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society.

Any questions, please contact mailto:natalie.duffus@biology.ox.ac.uk or mailto:william.paine@biology.ox.ac.uk