Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 2

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

Throughout history, drugs and medications have been used to produce transformations. Experiments with different substances have taken place in diverse contexts: individual, subcultural, communal, scientific, medical, commercial, criminal/illicit and transnational. Despite the immense diversity and heterogeneity of these experiments, each is subject to specific norms, protocols, evaluative criteria, and concerns; and each often entails assembling publics to validate their findings or assess whatever emerges from them. This Open Panel invites papers about the transformations (intended or otherwise) associated with different practices of drug experimentation and consumption. Against commonplace understandings of drugs as stable entities with unique chemical properties that act to produce identifiable effects, the ontological turn in STS inspires a growing number of drug researchers to conceive the action of drugs and their purported effects to be produced in relation to various other actors, arrangements and networks. How do the practical arrangements devised to put drugs to the test in different places and times tally with the historical, cultural, technological and material processes in which drugs are implicated, and which undoubtedly mediate, extend, and complicate their effects? How are those transformations that extend beyond the experimental apparatus accounted for? What gets neglected? What criteria render specific experiments legitimate, and others illicit, and how are these criteria contested, changed, and/or adapted over time? What is unique about the adventures such experimental subjects undertake? What matters to them? What can be learned from situating their activities? How are their findings translated to other situations, and with what implications?

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Producing Transformations: Drugs, bodies, and experimentation

Chair

• Kiran Pienaar, Monash University

Individual Presentations

• Testosterone’s Absence: Transgender Medicine and the ‘Evidence of Treatment’ - J.R. Latham, The University of Melbourne

• Non-binary testosterone users: Re-making trans gender hormone practices - Rillark Zac Bolton, Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

• Medical Technologies and Decision-Making Processes around Gender Assignment of Intersex People in India - Arpita Das, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

• Making naloxone: overdose, death, and community response in the United States - Peter J Davidson, University of California, San Diego

• Dangerous Affinities: The Silences in and Commitments of LARC Promotion in the US - Jenny Dyck Brian, Arizona State University

Session Organizers

• Kane Race, University of Sydney

• Kiran Pienaar, Monash University

• Dean Anthony Murphy, University of Sydney