Visualizing the Racialization of Testosterone in Biomedical Studies

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 1

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, the testosterone replacement therapy industry has grown to a more than $2 billion global industry. While feminist science studies scholars do well to explain why aging men are the primary consumers of these drugs, few critically examine how durable preoccupations about race influence the ways that biomedical experts prescribe testosterone. In this project, I use social network and content analysis to outline an ongoing controversy regarding how testosterone is implicated in prostate cancer. Although medical experts were trained for more than 75 years that higher levels of endogenous testosterone increase prostate cancer risk, an emerging group of researchers now claim that lower levels of testosterone exacerbate risk and that testosterone therapies may actually help treat prostate cancer for some patients. Still, the most widely used clinical guidelines for testosterone explicitly recommend against physicians prescribing these drugs to African American men because of their higher overall population risk of prostate cancer. To explore these contradictions, this work maps co-author and citation networks to outline how testosterone became racialized through the selective citation practices of a white nationalist hate group named the Pioneer Fund. Although claims about racial differences in testosterone are unsupported by most existing scientific evidence, the ideology that racial difference is biological still haunts the gold-standards of evidence-based medicine and thwarts access to testosterone for African American patients. This work contributes to science studies by showing how social network data visualization can help map controversies at the intersection of pharmaceuticalization and critical race studies.

Author

• Brandon Kramer