Hormones on the Move: Transnational Entanglements in the Everyday - I

Abstract

Contemporary human lives are deeply entangled with hormones – sometimes in disturbing, sometimes in enabling ways. Although hormones have been seminal to our understanding of biology since the beginning of the 20th century, in the contemporary world they also allow an insight into transnational movements and relations. Be it in the form of shared medical technologies and expertise, the travel of pharmaceuticals across boundaries, or the logics of hormonal usage shared online – hormones cross material and imagined borders. In the process of this bleeding, blending, bending, they make us rethink conceptual boundaries such as inside/outside, nature/culture, or sex/gender to name but a few.


In this panel, we employ an interdisciplinary lens to bear on the various ways hormones move human and non-human actors and how, in turn, they are mobilized by them. How do hormones travel in a globally entangled world and how do they intersect with human and nonhuman lives in various contexts? What mechanisms of control and regulatory measures are employed to contain them? What inequalities does the movement of hormones rely on and produce? And how can we follow hormones and their traces across space and time?


We seek papers, that draw on innovative empirical research and make visible various disciplinary and theoretical frameworks to understand the complex, mobile nature of hormones in the everyday. We are interested in case studies from various parts of the world with a focus on transnational entanglements.

Individual Presentations

• Technologies of Self: Endocrinology in the Historical and Contemporary Medical Management of Intersex and (In)Fertility - Mel Lynwood Ferrara, University of Arizona

• Uses of Testosterone and Redefinitions of Female Sexual Desire in Medical Practices in Brazil - Fabiola Rohden, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil

• Our Hormones, Our Selves: (Re)Thinking the Female Body through Contemporary Hormonal Management - Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, Victoria University of Wellington

Session Organizers

• Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, Victoria University of Wellington

• Sandra Bärnreuther, University of Zurich