Trans-Intimacies and Bodies in Motion

• In Event: Hormones on the Move: Transnational Entanglements in the Everyday - II

Abstract

In her book, The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lisa Lowe examines a past conditional temporality, reading for traces, to look through the intimacies and connections of transnational movement and liberalism, settler colonialism and slavery. Using Lowe’s heuristic of intimacies, I examine the development and movement of transgender hormone replacement therapy and its materials. This paper posits transgender bodies as always bodies-in-motion. A hormonally transgender body (undergoing hormone replacement therapy) carries within it histories of movement through the materiality of hormones and the oils in which they are suspended. What kinds of inter or intra-actions occur within the oils and the hormones? Particularly considering the plant origins of the injection oils - sesame, cottonseed, and castor bean - what emerges in looking at the histories of their production and curation? Thinking through a decolonial lens, I examine use and movement of these plants and their sterilization by the medical industry for injection into transgender bodies. I argue that trans bodies are permanently, impossibly tied to movement through the physical injection of these oils. I consider the layers of skin, fat, and muscle, the boundaries of medicine, law, and borders traversed by needle and plants alike, protecting and delivering the hormones. How are these bodies/materials/objects managed and legislated? What does the management of hormones signal?

Author

• Dana T Ahern, University of California Santa Cruz