Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body

148 S EXING THE B ODY
Scientists did not integrate gender into the body’s chemistry by conscious
design. Indeed, they simply went about their business as talented working
scientists. They investigated the hottest new research topics, found the financial
and material resources to support their work, established fruitful collaborations
between investigators with different backgrounds and training, and
ultimately, signed international agreements to standardize the naming and
experimental evaluation of the various chemical substances they purified and
examined. But in this and the following chapter, as we watch scientists engage
in each of these normal activities, we will also observe how, despite a lack of
overt intention, scientific work on hormone biology was deeply linked to gender
politics. I argue that we can understand the emergence of scientific accounts
of sex hormones only if we see the scientific and the social as part
of an inextricable system of ideas and practices—simultaneously social and
scientific. To illustrate, I turn to a key scientific moment in the history of
hormones, one in which scientists struggled to impose gender on the internal
secretions of ovaries and testes.
The discovery of ‘‘sex hormones’’ is an extraordinary episode in the history
of science. 10 By 1940, scientists had identified, purified, and named
them. As they explored hormone science (endocrinology), however, researchers
could make hormones intelligible only in terms of the struggles
around gender and race that characterized their working environments. Each
choice that scientists made about how to measure and name the molecules
they studied naturalized cultural ideas about gender. 11 Each institution and
persuasive community involved in hormone research brought to the table a
social agenda about race and gender. Pharmaceutical companies, experimental
biologists, physicians, agricultural biologists, and sex researchers intersected
with feminists, advocates of homosexual rights, eugenicists, birth control
advocates, psychologists, and charitable foundations. Each of these
groups, which I will call social worlds, were linked by people, ideas, laboratories,
research materials, and funding, and much more. 12 By examining how
these worlds intersected, we can see the ways in which certain molecules
became part of our system of gender—how gender became chemical.
Hormones! The Very Idea!
The gonads, people have long known, affect the body and psyche in myriad
ways. For centuries, farmers have known that castration affects both the physique
and behavior of farm animals. And although human castration was officially
banned by the Vatican, in Europe the specialized singing voices of the
castrati were heard in more than a few church choirs through the end of the