Sex(ing)/Gender(ing)

>	Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource Guide for the Transgender Community Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource Guide for the Transgender Community Trans Bodies, Trans Selves is a 649-page resource guide by and for the trans, gender expansive, and non-binary community and their families. It includes information on health, legal issues, cultural and social questions, relationships, history, activism, and much more. The first edition of Trans Bodies was published in 2014 by Oxford University Press. A second edition of the book is scheduled for publication on June 2021. More info on the book and the Trans Bodies, Trans Selves NGO can be found here.
>	Roy, Deboleena. Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. University of Washington Press, 2018. Roy, Deboleena. Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings, and Life in the Lab. University of Washington Press, 2018. "'Should feminists clone?' 'What do neurons think about?' 'How can we learn from bacterial writing?' These and other provocative questions have long preoccupied neuroscientist, molecular biologist, and intrepid feminist theorist Deboleena Roy, who takes seriously the capabilities of lab "objects"―bacteria and other human, nonhuman, organic, and inorganic actants―in order to understand processes of becoming. In Molecular Feminisms, Roy investigates science as feminism at the lab bench, engaging in an interdisciplinary conversation between molecular biology, Deleuzian philosophies, posthumanism, and postcolonial and decolonial studies. She brings insights from feminist theory together with lessons learned from bacteria, subcloning, and synthetic biology, arguing that renewed interest in matter and materiality must be accompanied by a feminist rethinking of scientific research methods and techniques." Read the full book online here, courtesy of a TOME grant from Emory University, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
>	Fausto‐Sterling, Anne. “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1—Sex and Gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.2 (2005): 1491–1527. Fausto‐Sterling, Anne. “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1—Sex and Gender.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30.2 (2005): 1491–1527. ABSTRACT: The author proposes that already well-developed dynamic systems theories can provide a better understanding of how social categories act on bone production. Such a framework, especially if it borrows from a second analytic trend called "life course analysis of chronic disease epidemiology" (Kuh and Ben-Shlomo 1997; Ben-Shlomo and Kuh 2002; Kuh and Hardy 2002), can improve our approaches to public health policy, prediction of individual health conditions, and the treatment of individuals with unhealthy bones. To see why we should follow new roads, the author considers gender, examining where we—feminist theorists and medical scientists—have recently been. In the second part of this study (Fausto-Sterling in preparation) the author will engage with current discussions of biology, race, and medicine to explore claims about racial difference in bone structure and function. This article is a call to arms. The sex-gender or nature-nurture accounts of difference fail to appreciate the degree to which culture is a partner in producing body systems commonly referred to as biology-something apart from the social. The author introduces an alternative—a life-course systems approach to the analysis of sex/gender.
>	Richardson, Sarah S. “Plasticity and Programming: Feminism and the Epigenetic Imaginary.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43.1 (2017): 29–52. Richardson, Sarah S. “Plasticity and Programming: Feminism and the Epigenetic Imaginary.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43.1 (2017): 29–52. ABSTRACT: The new science of epigenetics has raised hopes of an embrace of greater plasticity and variation within the biology of sex, gender, and sexuality than previously appreciated. This essay describes and analyzes the integration of epigenetics research into the scientific study of core biological pathways related to sex, gender, and sexuality in the brain in the post-Human Genome Project era. Through a close reading of the primary scientific literature, it demonstrates that epigenetic approaches in this subfield remain continuous with historically well-entrenched models of hardwired brain sexual dimorphism. Considering the opportunities and dilemmas of feminist engagements with the fast-moving and still nascent field of epigenetics, it argues that while epigenetics might become a resource for studies of the development and plasticity of gender-sexed bodies and identities, this will require active feminist contestations of the ontological and epistemological commitments of mainstream research in this field. Feminist attraction to the possibilities for epigenetic research to enable material investigation of gender embodiment and sexual variation follow a long tradition of feminist theoretical interest in plasticity-affirming biologies. Careful consideration of the case of epigenetics suggests a need for revised and more nuanced feminist appraisals of both plasticity-affirming and programming-centric models of biology, body, and sociality.
>	Irni, Sari. “On the Materialization of Hormone Treatment Risks: A Trans/Feminist Approach.” Body & Society 23.2 (2017): 106–31. Irni, Sari. “On the Materialization of Hormone Treatment Risks: A Trans/Feminist Approach.” Body & Society 23.2 (2017): 106–31. ABSTRACT: With a focus on hormone treatments, this article contributes to recent problematizations of the ontology of bodies, illnesses and medication. Hormone treatment is conventionally understood to comprise preparations like pills, patches or injections, and following from this understanding, the materiality of risk is perceived as potential adverse effects of pharmaceuticals within individual bodies. By discussing Finnish trans persons’ experiences of hormone treatments, and drawing from material feminisms and trans/feminist studies, this article rethinks what ‘hormone treatments’ and their risks materially entail. Stressing the importance of accounting for the relationality of risks, the article suggests that hormone treatment risks can be seen as Baradian ‘phenomena’ that materialize contextually within specific ‘treatment apparatuses’ and the power relations that saturate them. This process of materialization includes the gendering of risks and how the gender binary itself may at times constitute a risk.
>	Irni, Sari. “Steroid Provocations: On the Materiality of Politics in the History of Sex Hormones.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.3 (2016): 507–29. Irni, Sari. “Steroid Provocations: On the Materiality of Politics in the History of Sex Hormones.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41.3 (2016): 507–29. ABSTRACT: Revisiting the history of sex hormones, this article explores nonhuman contributions to the politics of sex. It argues that the development of steroid chemistry during the twentieth century not only produced a profit for pharmaceutical companies with hormone products designed to control reproduction and femininity, but it also resulted in a tension between the technological possibilities of steroids and the intelligibility of sex, where the boundaries of sexed life became contested in new ways. The article suggests that a focus on scientific and societal endeavors—in which the formation of sex characteristics was considered an unwanted side effect or risk rather than the effect that determined what sex hormones were—enables a reinterpretation of steroids as disruptive in the public sphere. The article draws on poststructuralist and material feminism as well as political science, including scholars such as Karen Barad, Myra Hird, Celia Roberts, Jane Bennett, and Jacques Ranciére. Instead of further widening the sphere of political subjectivity in order to include nonhumans, as in previous accounts by Bennett and Hird, the article suggests an alternative: the notion of a political act as disruption. It goes on to discuss three cases from the 1960s onward (regarding menopause treatment, anabolic steroids in elite sports, and legislation on sex reassignment) and argues that the history of sex be explored as a history of recurring provocations to the binary of the two sexes in which the specific and visible enactments of the phenomenon called “sex hormones” have been indispensable.
>	Laboria Cubonik's Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) Laboria Cubonik's Xenofeminist Manifesto (2015) "Xenofeminist Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation is authored by the anonymous feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks. LC is comprised of six women who, in their manifesto, attempt to 'denaturalize' the disciplines of science, technology, and ultimately, rationalism, from the grip of patriarchal power." —Koby L. Omansky, Cleveland Review of Books "From the home to the body, the articulation of a proactive politics for biotechnical intervention and hormones presses. Hormones hack into gender systems possessing political scope extending beyond the aesthetic calibration of individual bodies. Thought structurally, the distribution of hormones—who or what this distribution prioritizes or pathologizes—is of paramount import. The rise of the internet and the hydra of black market pharmacies it let loose—together with a publicly accessible archive of endocrinological knowhow—was instrumental in wresting control of the hormonal economy away from ‘gatekeeping’ institutions seeking to mitigate threats to established distributions of the sexual. To trade in the rule of bureaucrats for the market is, however, not a victory in itself. These tides need to rise higher. We ask whether the idiom of ‘gender hacking’ is extensible into a long-range strategy, a strategy for wetware akin to what hacker culture has already done for software—constructing an entire universe of free and open source platforms that is the closest thing to a practicable communism many of us have ever seen. Without the foolhardy endangerment of lives, can we stitch together the embryonic promises held before us by pharmaceutical 3D printing (‘Reactionware’), grassroots telemedical abortion clinics, gender hacktivist and DIY-HRT forums, and so on, to assemble a platform for free and open source medicine?” —Section 0x16 Read the full manifesto here.
>	Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press, 2013. Preciado, Paul B. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. The Feminist Press, 2013. What constitutes a "real" man or woman in the twenty-first century? Since birth control pills, erectile dysfunction remedies, and factory-made testosterone and estrogen were developed, biology is definitely no longer destiny. In this penetrating analysis of gender, Paul B. Preciado shows the ways in which the synthesis of hormones since the 1950s has fundamentally changed how gender and sexual identity are formulated, and how the pharmaceutical and pornography industries are in the business of creating desire. This riveting continuation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality also includes Preciado's diaristic account of his own use of testosterone every day for one year, and its mesmerizing impact on his body as well as his imagination.
>	Menopausal Gentleman (1996) Menopausal Gentleman (1996) Menopausal Gentleman is Peggy Shaw’s bluesy, pseudo-stream-of-consciousness lounge act about a butch lesbian going through “the change.” Shaw riffs on the hormonal effects of menopause complete with hot flashes, cold sweats, humor and tears. Written and performed by Peggy Shaw and directed by Rebecca Taichman. More info here.
>	Koerber, Amy. Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. Koerber, Amy. Hysteria to Hormones: A Rhetorical History. The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018. In From Hysteria to Hormones, Amy Koerber examines the rhetorical activity that preceded the early twentieth-century emergence of the word hormone and the impact of this word on expert understandings of women’s health. Shortly after Ernest Henry Starling coined the term “hormone” in 1905, hormones began to provide a chemical explanation for bodily phenomena that were previously understood in terms of “wandering wombs,” humors, energies, and balance. In this study, Koerber posits that the discovery of hormones was not so much a revolution as an exigency that required old ways of thinking to be twisted, reshaped, and transformed to fit more scientific turn-of-the-century expectations of medical practices. She engages with texts from a wide array of medical and social scientific subdisciplines; with material from medical archives, including patient charts, handwritten notes, and photographs from the Salpêtrière Hospital, where Dr. Jean Charcot treated hundreds of hysteria patients in the late nineteenth century; and with current rhetorical theoretical approaches to the study of health and medicine. In doing so, Koerber shows that the boundary between older, nonscientific ways of understanding women’s bodies and newer, scientific understandings is much murkier than we might expect. A clarifying examination of how the term “hormones” preserves key concepts that have framed our understanding of women’s bodies from ancient times to the present, this innovative book illuminates the ways in which the words we use today to discuss female reproductive health aren’t nearly as scientifically accurate or socially progressive as believed. Scholars of rhetoric, gender studies, and women’s health will find Koerber’s work provocative and valuable.
>	Rian Hammond's Open Source Gendercodes (2015) Rian Hammond's Open Source Gendercodes (2015) Open Source Gendercodes (OSG) is a project focused on developing an open source platform for the production of sex hormones. The development of a transgenic plant that could allow “laypeople” to grow sex hormones would not only call into question the cultural and institutional frameworks that govern queer and trans bodies, it would also challenge the current system of pharmaceutical production. Can we imagine a communal system of pharmaceutical production in which biological materials are collectively owned?
>	Nast, Condé. “What It’s Like to Medically Transition As a Nonbinary Person.” them. Nast, Condé. “What It’s Like to Medically Transition As a Nonbinary Person.” them. "How do you make sense of your body and how it’s changing when all available narratives feel too gendered to apply?" Published August 1, 2018 in them.
>	Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science The Transitional States: Hormones at the Crossroads of Art and Science video art exhibition sees 14 artists and collectives present their experiences and interpretations of the various roles these essential chemicals play. In these works, the artists explore how hormone use has affected sexuality, gender identity and fluidity, and how it has offered some people the freedom to express themselves. The works highlight and comment on the major role society plays in influencing and regulating gender identity. Other artists look at the medicalisation of women’s bodies in relation to birth control, menopause and ageing, and offer different perspectives on how we use hormones to improve and sometimes constrain our lives in ways we rarely consider.
>	Harvard's GenderSci Lab Harvard's GenderSci Lab "The GenderSci Lab is a collaborative, interdisciplinary research lab dedicated to generating feminist concepts, methods, and theories for scientific research on sex and gender. Through research, teaching, and public outreach, we work to advance the intersectional study of gender in the biomedical and allied sciences, counter bias and hype in sex difference research, and enhance public discourse surrounding the sciences of sex and gender." More specifically, the GenderSci Lab has a research project entitled "Context and Variation in the Evolutionary Ecology of Sex and Gender," which includes investigations related to more expansive biosocial conceptions of Hormone Replacement Therapy. As described on their website, "We use cross-contextual comparisons to examine variation in the distribution of sex, gender, and reproduction-related traits, and seek novel forms of data to analyze the longitudinal and life course dimensions of these traits in human populations. Of particular interest is how demographic transitions in fertility rates and epidemiological shifts in exogenous hormone use and adiposity over the past century create distinct ecological contexts for sex- and gender-related traits."
>	Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology "Somatosphere is a collaborative website covering the intersections of medical anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural psychiatry, psychology and bioethics. Founded in 2008 by a small group of medical anthropologists, Somatosphere has grown to become a key online forum for debate and discussion in medical anthropology, as well as in the humanities and social sciences of health and medicine more broadly. Somatosphere encourages a range of viewpoints to raise critical questions, debate and commentary about contemporary and historical matters of science, healing, illness, and the body. The goal for Somatosphere is not only to publish engaging essays, reviews, and new research in medical anthropology and social science, but to incorporate the flexibility and networking capabilities of digital media, generating new and rich links in and among ideas and across disciplinary boundaries. The site has also increasingly taken on the task of facilitating current discussions and debates on the methods, arguments and politics of social science, both by extending discussions that occur at academic conferences as well as by publishing point-counterpoint pieces and book forums."
>	Hayward, Eva. "Transxenoestrogenesis." Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1-2 (2014): 255-258. Hayward, Eva. "Transxenoestrogenesis." Transgender Studies Quarterly 1.1-2 (2014): 255-258. Taken from the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. "Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, “Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,” revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines."
>	Gunson, Jessica Shipman. “Nature, Menstrual Suppression, and the Value of Material Feminism.” Health Sociology Review 25.3 (2016): 312–25. Gunson, Jessica Shipman. “Nature, Menstrual Suppression, and the Value of Material Feminism.” Health Sociology Review 25.3 (2016): 312–25. ABSTRACT: This article revisits women’s accounts of menstrual suppression and considers the value in using material feminist theory to discuss the concept of nature in this context. Whilst a sociological, poststructuralist framing of nature as discourse has been useful in challenging essentialist claims about women’s bodies, I argue now that engaging with material feminism acknowledges both the material and discursive ways in which women talk about menstruation and its suppression. This article draws on qualitative data gathered in the aftermath of the approval of the first extended cycle oral contraceptive. In their narratives women struggled to unite the desire to frame their perceptions as natural whilst at the same time upholding the right to use synthetic interventions to control menstruation. Building on poststructural and embodiment theory, as well as drawing on the concept of ‘naturecultures’ [Haraway, D. (1991). Simians, cyborgs and women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge], I argue it is helpful for health sociology to incorporate material feminism in order to advance understanding of ambivalence in relation to new reproductive technologies.
>	Roberts, Celia. “Sex, Race and ‘Unnatural’ Difference Tracking the Chiastic Logic of Menopause-Related Discourses.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 11.1 (2004): 27–44. Roberts, Celia. “Sex, Race and ‘Unnatural’ Difference Tracking the Chiastic Logic of Menopause-Related Discourses.” European Journal of Women’s Studies 11.1 (2004): 27–44. ABSTRACT: Theorizing interconnections of sexual and racial differences remains a core problematic within feminist theory. In this article the author argues that these connections might in some cases usefully be understood as constituting a chiasmas. The term ‘chiasmas’ is taken from MichËle Le Doeuff’s analysis of the writings of 18th-century physiologist Pierre Roussel. Le Doeuff argues that Roussel’s understanding of sexual difference is chiastic. An examination of contemporary medical and scientific discourses around the menopause and its treatment through hormone replacement therapy (HRT) takes the argument onto new ground. The author argues here that menopause-related discourses rely on a chiastic logic that connects sexual difference with racial differences. Identification of such logics may prove useful to feminist analyses of specific entanglements of the logics of sexual and racial differences, in contemporary and historical instances.