Celeste Orr

Dr. Celeste E. Orr (they/them) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Wendy J. Robbins Professor in Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of New Brunswick Fredericton Campus.

Research interests

• Intersex studies
• Disability studies
• Queer studies
• Feminist, gender, and women’s studies
• Sociology of medicine, health, and the body
• Violence studies

Dr. Orr is an interdisciplinary scholar who is interested in interrogating questions of the ever-shifting categorization of body-minds, culturally mandated ways of be(com)ing, and the effects/affects of pathologization and violence through an intersectional lens.

Dr. Orr’s recently published book, Cripping Intersex (UBC Press, 2022), investigates how intersex and interphobia intersect with disability and ableism to propose a new field – crip intersex studies – and argues for a crip approach to intersex activism and scholarship. In integrating feminist disability studies with intersex studies, Dr. Orr also provides tools to break down both the traditional sex dyad and the entrenched cultural mandate against intersex traits.

Currently, Dr. Orr and co-investigator Dr. Nicholas Hrynyk are working on a SSHRC-funded project and manuscript (Concordia UP) tentatively titled Anticipated Violence and the Queer Subject. The main aim of this project is to understand the ways queer people anticipate violence from outside and within the queer community and the embodied impacts of said anticipation.

Education

• PhD, Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa, 2018
• MA, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory, McMaster University, 2013
• MA, Philosophy, Queen’s University, 2012
• BA, Philosophy and English Literature, McMaster University, 2011

Selected publications

Orr, Celeste E. 2023. “Covid and In/Essential Intersex Medical Management.” In Covid and…How to Do Rhetoric in a Pandemic, edited by Emily Winderman, Allison L. Rowland, and Jennifer Malkowski. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

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

Orr, Celeste E., and Shoshana Magnet. 2022. “Feminist Surveillance Studies and the Institutionalization of Interphobia.” Surveillance & Society 20 (4): 420-433.

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

Magnet, Shoshana, and Celeste E. Orr, eds. 2022. “Feminist Loneliness Studies.” Special issue, Feminist Theory 23 (1): 1-139.

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 Jaremko Bromwich, and Pamela Morgan Redela, 15-48. Bradford: Demeter Press.