Celeste E. Orr

Visiting Assistant Professor Gender and Sexuality Studies Department
Education

Ph.D., Feminist & Gender Studies
University of Ottawa

M.A., Cultural Studies & Critical Theory
McMaster University

M.A., Philosophy 
Queen’s University

B.A., Philosophy & English Literature
McMaster University

Celeste Orr

Dr. Celeste E. Orr’s research is situated at the intersection of intersex, disability, and queer studies. They explore the complex discursive, political, and embodied connection between intersex and disability as well as compulsory dyadism and able-bodiedness. They ask: how do we understand and reconcile the contested meanings, responses to, and effects of intersex-and/as-disability? Orr interrogates and extends questions of the ever-shifting categorization of body-minds, culturally mandated ways of being, and (the haunting effects of) pathologization, trauma, and violence through an intersectional lens. Broadly speaking, Orr’s research interests include intersex studies, disability and mad studies, gender and queer theories, bio/ethics, sociology of medicine, and the processes of medicalization/pathologization.

Orr’s book, Cripping Intersex, will be published 15 September 2022 and is available for pre-order via the University of British Columbia Press. Current projects include Anticipated Violence and the Queer Subject (manuscript proposal accepted, Concordia University Press) co-authored with Dr. Nicholas Hrynyk and “Introducing Mad Intersex Studies” co-authored with Dr. Meg Peters.

Orr teaches classes pertaining to disability and health studies, intersex studies, feminist theories, and gender and sexuality studies. Their classes provide students with the opportunity to learn about, unlearn, and undermine the everyday power structures that naturalize unjust systems and violent hierarchies through collective acknowledgment, critical understanding, and active resistance.

Courses Taught

GNDR103: Gender & Society
GNDR290: Gender & Feminist Theory
GNDR369: Making Sexualities
GNDR4024: Dis/Ability, Gender, & Health
GNDR4025: Pop Culture, Gender, & Sexuality
GNDR4036: De/Constructing Sex Differences: Intersex, Health, & Gender

Publications

Orr, Celeste E. Forthcoming. “Covid and In/Essential Intersex Medical Management.” In Covid and…How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic, edited by Jennifer Malkowski, Allison Rowland, and Emily Winderman. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Celeste E. Orr. Forthcoming Sept 2022. Cripping Intersex. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.

Magnet, Shoshana, and Celeste E. Orr, eds. 2022. “Feminist Loneliness Studies.” Special issue, Feminist Theory 23 (1).

Magnet, Shoshana, and Celeste E. Orr. 2022. “Feminist Loneliness Studies: an introduction.” Feminist Theory 23 (1): 3-22.

Orr, Celeste E., and Amanda D. Watson. 2021. “‘Usually the mother:’ Dilation and the medical management of intersex children.” In From Band-Aids to Scalpels: Motherhood Experiences in/of Medicine, edited by Rohini Bannerjee and Karim Mukhida, 65-83. Bradford: Demeter Press.

Orr, Celeste E. 2019. “Resisting the Demand to Stand: Boys, Bathrooms, Hypospadias, and Interphobic Violence.” Boyhood Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (2): 89-113.

Orr, Celeste E., and Amanda D. Watson. 2018. “‘We changed her nappies. We saw that she was a girl.’ Caster Semenya’s Femininity and the Power of Maternal Testimony.” In Mothering, Mothers, and Sport: Experiences, Representations, Resistances, edited by Judy Battaglia, Rebecca Bromwich, and Pamela Redela, 15-48. Bradford: Demeter Press.

Orr, Celeste E. (2016) 2019. “(Liberatory) Reproductive Technologies and (Eugenic) Interphobic Selection.” In Connecting, Rethinking and Embracing Difference, edited by Anthony Gambrell, Debora Osborne, and Lawrence Buttigieg, 87-102. Brill Publishers.

Contact Information