rian ciela hammond

MAPPING A HORMONE HYPEROBJECT

The following is an excerpt from Mapping a Hormone Hyperobject a textual weaving through past-present-futures of the slippery, energetic, invisibly tiny forms we call steroid hormones. Testosterone, Estrogen, Progesterone, and Cortisone are biological languages produced and exchanged between cells and organs, between bodies, and across ecosystems. They slip freely through these porous boundaries to tangle with the molecular choreographies inside of us, where their presence can modify the movements, growth, and composition of various cells, effecting the feeling of what it is to be, and the way we appear in the world.

Mapping a Hormone Hyperobject emerged from Open Source Gendercodes (2015-ongoing) which pursues experiments with biotechnology and steroid hormones from a copyleft transfeminist position, specifically focusing on imagining and experimenting with hormone production methods that might someday enable greater body autonomy for those who rely on synthetic hormones to survive. The full text can be found at www.molecularfemale.com

PART (1) SCIENCE AS COLONIAL DISCOURSE

Technoscience is a continued colonial discourse. By this I mean that technoscience has ultimately operated as a tool of hegemonic European and North American power. Its activities and inquiries are guided by the needs of the state. Its positioning of itself as a keeper of truths empowering or legitimating violence towards those deemed animal or subhuman. I also mean, quite literally, that the material networks and bodies of knowledge which comprise technoscience today are built off the exploitation of and experimentation on marginalized people, colonial seizures of land, and biopiracy of indigenous knowledges. Coming to understand the ways that these ongoing colonial practices have shaped today’s technoscientific sphere is essential to approaching the task of asking what is gender and what are gender biocodes (such as estrogen and testosterone).

 In attempts to learn about current technologies used to produce testosterone, estrogen, and progesterone, I’ve found myself tracing through a complex socio-political-material web. The development of these technologies from the late 1800s up to the present is entangled with power structures and ideological frameworks. The most obvious of which being the dyadic conceptualization of sex and gender that remains a legacy of European colonization around the world. Through the past two centuries of biotechnical innovation, it was precisely this binary sex/gender framework -- taken up as scientific nomenclature -- that birthed tech for exogenous hormone production alongside the psychomedical profiles for normative binary gender and its dissidents given various names through time such as, transvestite, hermaphrodite, transsexual, homosexual, etc. By attempting to render bodies as well as desires and behaviors legible within a hetero-dyadic framework, this system produces normal and abnormal bodies. Both the motives of seeking a technological correction for bodies labeled abnormal and fantasies of enhancing those considered normal to become hyper legibly male and female (or hyperpolarized) shaped the evolution of hormone tech. Here, gender normativity -- the alignment of the various aspects of phenotype, behavior, and desire within this hetero-dyadic system -- becomes synonymous with health, productivity, and worth. I will not flesh out an in-depth argument against binary sex and gender classification systems, as this has been thoroughly deconstructed by theorists, biologists, anthropologists, activists, and others. The countless trans, intersex, two-spirit, non-binary, gender non-conforming, and queer people who reject narratives that attempt to erase them as outliers, anomalies, or pathological should be enough. Instead, I will perform a weaving or storytelling here, to trace some of the paths through which these entanglements can be rendered into a tangible presence.

Aside from the binary regime, a constellation of geopolitical conflicts, state enforced frameworks for the ownership of organisms and biomolecules, population control and reproductive regimes have shaped these molecular prostheses. This web of becomings, which is massively distributed through time and space, I’ve started referring to as a hormonal hyperobject (borrowing Timothy Morton’s term). To see hormones as a hyperobject, is to recognize that testosterone, progesterone, and estrogen cannot be simply reduced to individual molecules with known molecular structures and energetic properties. They can never exist for us as a single substance in one place at one time. They are psychosocial artifacts charged with a liveness that extends far beyond their ability to stimulate cellular receptors and modulate the morphological flow of bodies. As described by Morton, hyperobjects are entities massively distributed through space and time. They are viscous, sticking to any other objects they touch. They are molten in their refuting that spacetime is fixed, concrete, and consistent. They are phased, existing in a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally perceive. As they phase in and out of our perceptive grasp, we sense fragments, flickers, and glimmers of their being. They are non-local, and inter-objective, being composed of relations of relations of relations.

So, through the process of telling stories that map the relationships constituting a hormone hyperobjects hyperextended being I am asking: how can we think a hyperobject? I hope to in a way, conjure this hyperobject into some presence amplifying what can be known through sensation alone. In these manifestations, although momentary, flickering, and continually phasing in and out of our experience of space-time, I hope to find ulterior pathways. Imaginings, and becomings, and future choreographies that open new frames. Possibilities for multimorphic gendered and sexed being. Possibilities for an anti-colonial technoscience to operate against oppressive regimes of mapping the body; regimes of thought whose colonial genesis—in the instrumentalization of technoscientific authority towards the pursuit of dominance, ownership, and wealth extraction—is ongoing. Colonization is not a historical moment, but an ongoing process. We must center anti-coloniality in everything we do. To borrow the words of Artist and Theorist Micha Cárdenas, “it is important that trans activists and scholars learn from movements such as the black radical tradition and women of color feminism to fight for, articulate, and remember an abolitionist trans tradition that understands gender policing as part of a larger colonial project including police, prisons, universities, and surveillance technologies” (Cárdenas, 2017).

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PART (1.4) PLASTIC SYNTHETIC HORMONAL PROSTHETIC

POLLUTED FLUID BODIES AND ENDOCRINAL DRIFT

Prior to the technoscientific isolation, synthesis, and masculine/feminine assignments of steroid hormone molecular forms (beginning in the early 1930s) those accused of having committed homosexual acts or those who were perceived as not anatomically/behaviorally matched to their assigned gender (for example a boy having thin, limp wrists, wide hips, or not liking sports) were deemed eligible for any range of supposedly corrective hormonal treatments, gonadal surgeries, or psychosurgical treatments. But with the classification of steroid hormones and subsequent development of more sensitive assays for their presence in bodily fluids, the markers of gendered/sexed truth were now molecularly coded. Beginning in 1939, urinary hormone assays were widely recommended as a method of detecting “female” hormones in the urine of men, and “male” hormones in the urine of women which was believed to serve as proof of homosexuality (Sengoopta, 2006). Diagnosis of homosexuality or other forms of sex and gender “degeneracy” made through urinalysis were increasingly treated in erratic and contradictory ways with various hormone preparations. This was especially true as more diverse and potent forms of pharmaceutical hormones became available during what is referred to as the “golden age” of steroid chemistry (1930s-1950s). During this time, hormones were extracted from pig ovaries, bull testicles, the urine of pregnant people, pregnant mares, police officers and army personnel, as well as gonads taken from imprisoned people. Protocols were developed to create laboratory synthesized copies of these gonad extracted biomolecules by transforming cholesterol in the oils harvested off sheeps wool or transforming molecules from plants called phytosterols. The US government in collaboration with several corporate partners undertook a series of colonial explorations in Africa, the West Indies, Central and South America to prospect plants with high phytosterol content. At the same time, an explosion of petroleum-based chemistry facilitated the proliferation of synthetic hormonal petrochemicals like BPA (commonly used in plastics today) and DES (Diethylstilbestrol). Some of these petro-derivative synthetics were up to 400 times more potent than biologically produced steroid hormones.

Evidence supporting the ability of the urinalysis techniques developed during this “golden age” to determine sexual or gender “deviance” remains non-existent. Efficacy studies from the time, produced wildly varied and contradictory results. Even when urinary hormone ratios of single individuals were analyzed through time there was significant variation in the results. Despite this, standard urinary hormone ranges for healthy heterosexual cisgender men and women were created, and urinalysis was used in many cases as proof in criminal cases in the U.S. In The New Hormones in the Clinic, Chandak Sengoopta describes the case of a 17 year old girl whose denial of “homosexual inclinations” was “confirmed” through urinalysis:

...‘Hormone assays of the urine are important in helping to disprove homosexuality in a normal individual where arrest has been made because of an alleged overt act.’ Wright recalled one of his cases: ‘The patient was a girl of seventeen, whose teacher, a homosexual woman, made love to her. The girl denied homosexual inclinations and her hormone assay was normal….Subsequent investigations confirmed these negative findings.’ (Sengoopta, 2006)

It is important to note here, that during this time period (early to mid 1900s) what we often think of today as the distinct but related categories of sex, sexuality, and gender were flattened into one singular space. Any deviation from established norms of a person’s assigned sex/gender be they anatomical, hormonal, behavioral, or expressed desires could render them aberrant and therefore “homosexual.” Because of this, when reading these historical texts, we have to assume that many identities today considered to be separate and distinct, were all amalgamated into a single indistinguishable category of third gender, or sex/gender deviant, which for these psychologists and endocrinologists often was “homosexual.” The conflation of sex, gender, and sexuality can be seen clearly in this 1941 paper published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine:

One of the major problems with which the psychologist and the endocrinologist are jointly confronted is that of homosexuality. That the overt sexual behavior of the infra-human mammals is largely determined by hormonal factors is well known. Insofar as the temperament can be judged by behavior, this too is involved. Steinach’s transformation of male into female guinea pigs by castration followed by ovarian grafts showed that homosexuality can be experimentally induced… Such evidences could be greatly multiplied. That homosexuality in man may be determined in important degree by imbalance of male and female sex-hormone production is suggested by the recent work of Glass, Wright, and others who report high estrogen-to-androgen ratios in homosexual males. (Rosenzweig and Hoskins, 1941)

Their assertion that the castration of a guinea pig’s testicles along with implantation of ovaries could not only render it “female” but that this also represented the experimental induction of homosexuality illuminates two things about their thinking. First, it shows us the collapsed conceptualization of sex, gender, and sexuality that their discourse functioned within. Second, the assertion that the removal of testes and assumed novel introduction of estrogen (through ovarian grafts) into the guinea pig’s body “transformed” it from male to female shows us where the steroid hormone is positioned within their hierarchy of evidence. The hormone was for them, the ultimate marker of sexed/gendered truth. With the introduction of the concept of hormonal secretions as molecular essences of masculinity and femininity, molecular codes eclipsed the external anatomical features, which in some sense no longer mattered. It's in this deferral to the unseen (the molecular, the energetic) that these scientists attempting to codify a colonial binary heteropatriarchy into scientific authority unintentionally initiate a queering of their own binary framework. The “primacy of vision in European intellectual history” (Bakare-Yusuf, 2000) which had given rise to the anatomical regime of sex/gender assignment through visual inspection of genital anatomy had begun to give way to a new regime of molecular truth in which Queers, Trans, and Interesex people hijacked these molecular codes to affirm, amplify, and multiply pre-existing non-binary ways of being.

Rian Ciela Hammond is an artist, biologist, transfeminista, and hormone hirstorian. Their current long term project (started 2015), Open Source Gendercodes, has focused on the intersection of gender variation and technoscience; by working towards novel hormone production technologies, OSG attempts to queer current regimes of ownership and bio-power. Most recently the project has been showcased in a chapter of the book, Art As We Don’t Know It, as well as a virtual exhibition titled Molecular Female at El Museo of Buffalo NY. Ryanhammond.us