Abstract
Hormones are complex biosocial objects that provoke myriad cultural narratives through their association with social activities and identities, and these narratives have the power to shape people’s lived realities and bodies. While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ capable of controlling various life processes, their explanatory potential has now been overshadowed by technoscientific developments like omics- and gene-based biotechnologies that have reframed how human bodies and behaviours are understood. Considering these shifts, this paper asks what roles hormones perform and what stories they are arousing today. Through a patchwork of four hormone stories about contraception, gender hacking, birth, and autism-specific horse therapy, we show how hormones remain vital protagonists in the constitution of bodies, affects, environments, places, politics, and selves in the contemporary period. Building on new materialist approaches, we adopt and extend the notion of ‘emplotment’ to encapsulate how hormones act as key characters in our plots. They are working to complicate dominant understandings of what bodies are and can be in new ways as they mediate different plots of bodily experience, in ways showing the ongoing powerful salience of hormones and their ascendancy in the present.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Number of pages | 24 |
| Journal | BioSocieties |
| Early online date | 28 Jan 2024 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 28 Jan 2024 |
| Event | Regulating the Hormonal Self - , Switzerland Duration: 6 Dec 2022 → 8 Dec 2022 https://fondation-brocher.ch/event/regulating-the-hormonal-self-2/ |
Bibliographical note
Acknowledgements: We would like to express our gratitude to all the participants who took part in the research projects upon which this paper is based. The paper would not have been possible without their generosity and the time they took to share their stories and experiences with us. We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their useful suggestions that helped us improve this paper, and we are grateful to Celia Robert for her insight, support and mentorship during the development of this paper. We would also like to express our thanks to the Brocher Institute for funding the Regulating the Hormonal Self workshop and to all participants who took part in the workshop. The discussions during the workshop helped us to consolidate the ideas that are developed in this paper. Th research on which this paper is based were funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust (grant number: 09519/Z/ 17/Z) and the ESRC (grant number: ES/J500136/1). For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied for a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission.Data Availability Statement
The participants of the studies on which this paper is based did not give written consent for their data to be shared publicly, so due to the sensitive nature of the research, supporting data is not available.Keywords
- Hormones
- Emplotment
- Narrative
- Stories
- New Materialism