{"title":"Hormonal stories: a new materialist exploration of hormonal emplotment in four case studies","authors":"","doi":"10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46976,"journal":{"name":"Biosocieties","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Biosocieties","FirstCategoryId":"3","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-023-00317-8","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, BIOMEDICAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
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.
期刊介绍：
BioSocieties is committed to the scholarly exploration of the crucial social, ethical and policy implications of developments in the life sciences and biomedicine. These developments are increasing our ability to control our own biology; enabling us to create novel life forms; changing our ideas of ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’; transforming our understanding of personal identity, family relations, ancestry and ‘race’; altering our social and personal expectations and responsibilities; reshaping global economic opportunities and inequalities; creating new global security challenges; and generating new social, ethical, legal and regulatory dilemmas. To address these dilemmas requires us to break out from narrow disciplinary boundaries within the social sciences and humanities, and between these disciplines and the natural sciences, and to develop new ways of thinking about the relations between biology and sociality and between the life sciences and society.
BioSocieties provides a crucial forum where the most rigorous social research and critical analysis of these issues can intersect with the work of leading scientists, social researchers, clinicians, regulators and other stakeholders. BioSocieties defines the key intellectual issues at the science-society interface, and offers pathways to the resolution of the critical local, national and global socio-political challenges that arise from scientific and biomedical advances.
As the first journal of its kind, BioSocieties publishes scholarship across the social science disciplines, and represents a lively and balanced array of perspectives on controversial issues. In its inaugural year BioSocieties demonstrated the constructive potential of interdisciplinary dialogue and debate across the social and natural sciences. We are becoming the journal of choice not only for social scientists, but also for life scientists interested in the larger social, ethical and policy implications of their work. The journal is international in scope, spanning research and developments in all corners of the globe.
BioSocieties is published quarterly, with occasional themed issues that highlight some of the critical questions and problematics of modern biotechnologies. Articles, response pieces, review essays, and self-standing editorial pieces by social and life scientists form a regular part of the journal.
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