Fluid ecologies: Changing hormonal systems of embodied difference

In her introduction to Modest Witness@Second Millennium, Donna Haraway suggests that the late twentieth century could be described as an era of "technobiopower" rather than one of biopower (Haraway 1997: 12). In place of Foucault's (1978) nineteenth-century landscape of the administration, therapeutics, and surveillance of bodies as living organisms, Haraway describes a contemporary world constituted by an "implosion of the technical, organic, political, economic, oneiric and textual" that produces cyborg bodies. Such cyborg bodies, she suggests, "inhabit less the domains of 'life,' with its developmental and organic temporalities, than of 'life itself,' with its temporalities embedded in communications enhancement and system redesign" (Haraway 1997: 12).1 In these contemporary domains, life is "enterprised up" (Haraway 1997: 12), disaggregated into "bits" that are consequently, as Franklin (2003) argues, available for (bio)capital formation. In this world, Haraway suggests, "biology"- referring both to a set of techoscientific discourses and to historically specific forms of lived embodiments-becomes an accumulation strategy: "For us, that is, those interpellated into this materialized story, the biological world is an accumulation strategy in the fruitful collapse of metaphor and materiality that animates technoscience" (Haraway 1997: 97). For Haraway, Franklin, and many others, this change in the configurations of life and biology has distinct and significant implications for how we live today. Rabinow (1992), Novas and Rose (2000), Rapp (1999), and others use Rabinow's term "biosociality" to describe the ways in which the lives of individuals and groups are mutated through their engagement with contemporary technobiopower. In different ways, all these theorists argue that new biological discourses produce novel identities and forms of social engagement. Inspired by this work and by feminist corporeal theory, I am interested in the implications of contemporary transformations in understandings of biological bodies for theorizations of sexual difference. In what ways do biological bodies continue to "matter," to use Butler's (1993) term, in the production of sexual difference today? To explore this question, this chapter analyzes a contemporary change in one of Western technoscience's central conceptualizations of the sexed body: that of endocrinology. Critically reading a range of technoscientific, biomedical, and ecological texts, I suggest that the hormonally sexed body is currently undergoing a significant reconfiguration. Throughout the twentieth century, the hormonally sexed body was configured as a bounded, homeostatic system into which pharmacological hormonal interventions could be made straightforwardly. At the turn of the twenty-first century, I argue, this configuration is breaking down. This breakdown stems from two key factors. First, mounting evidence describes the widespread and systemic negative impacts of hormones used as medical treatments (for example, in hormone replacement therapy) on human bodies. The effects of the hormonal antimiscarriage medication diethylstilbestrol (DES) on the descendants of women who took it provide a stark example of the transmission of hormonal effects across generations. Animal evidence is now suggesting that the granddaughters of these women are, like their mothers, at increased risk of reproductive-tract cancers (Newbold, Hanson, Jefferson, Bullock, Haseman, and McLachlan 1998). Second, there is increasing concern about the effects of hormones and chemicals that act like hormones (endocrine-disrupting chemicals) in the environment. These chemicals enter the environment in many ways: they are excreted by humans into water systems; they leach from paints, plastics, detergents, cosmetics, and fertilizers, among other things, into soil, water, and skin; and they enter the food chain when animals that have been treated with hormones or affected by endocrine-disrupting chemicals are consumed by other animals or by humans. The effects of such chemicals are deeply contested but are increasingly described as highly problematic. Through the effects of these two factors, I suggest, hormonally sexed bodies are being reconfigured as unbounded, as lacking coherence, and as under globalized threat from the environment. The contemporary hormonally sexed body, in other words, is disintegrating into "bits." As an instantiation of technobiopower, this reconfiguration has relevance to thinking not only about hormones and hormonally sexed bodies but also about other aspects of contemporary biological bodies-for example, genes. It also has significant implications for scientific and popular understandings of biological sexual difference and, consequently, for the everyday lives of embodied men and women. In this chapter, I argue that the disintegration of the twentieth-century hormonal body creates significant tensions between, on the one hand, modern mod- els of medical control and intervention and, on the other, a more contemporary version of the body as situated within highly complex ecological systems, the control of which lies far beyond the reach of medicine and must involve governments and corporations as well as individuals in any attempted change. In the case of hormonally sexed bodies, this tension is evident in two ways. First, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs, such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the World Wildlife Fund for Nature) have in recent years lobbied governments (at all levels, including supranational bodies like the European Union) and corporations in serious attempts to get them to take responsibility for chemicals in the environment in the face of significant technoscientific uncertainty about their effects. These efforts, as discussed below, are often frustrated. Second (and in the face of significant failures on the part of governments and corporations to respond in ways that will protect citizens from the effects of endocrine disruptors), these tensions feed into increasing demands, voiced most strongly by environmental groups but also repeated in the mass media, for women to become responsible for monitoring their own and other bodies' exposure to hormones and endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Such demands, made in the face of great uncertainty both about the effects of endocrine disruptors and about the possibility of regulation, indicate that the contemporary hormonally sexed body has moved out of the realm of medicine and become an object for gendered practices of care.