Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-vmclg Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-27T11:55:13.201Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Reframing the Social, Rethinking the Body, Confronting Biologism

from Part One - Openings and Orientations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2023

By
Victor Sacha Cova  and
Heather Anne Swanson
Edited by
Cecilia McCallum ,
Silvia Posocco  and
Martin Fotta
Cecilia McCallum
Affiliation:
Universidade Federal da Bahia, Brazil
Silvia Posocco
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, University of London
Martin Fotta
Affiliation:
Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences
Get access

Summary

This chapter introduces approaches to materiality and biology within anthropological scholarship on sex and gender. It emphasizes how biological subfield of eco-evo-devo (which emerged in dialogue with feminist studies) can contribute to anthropological debates. The authors focus on hormones, signaling molecules that regulate many physiological processes in humans, animals, and plants. Hormones are a particularly productive site for considering how anthropologists interested in sex, gender, and bodies might benefit from additional attention to biological processes and biological knowledges, as they challenge prevailing concepts and categorical oppositions of self/world, nature/culture, and mind/matter. The authors first sketch out a history of the relationship between anthropology and biology and, within that history, how feminists have confronted biologism. They then introduce eco-evo-devo and explore how its insights about hormones and development can serve as a prompt to rethink the body within anthropology. Last, they review examples of social scientific engagement with hormones, arguing that a deeper engagement with the materiality of hormones rather than only with their popular representation can help anthropologists continue their ongoing efforts to reframe the social and apprehend gender and sexuality as entangled within complex ecologies of industrial capitalism.

Keywords

bodybiologybiosocialhuman-animal relationshormonesevolutionecologygeneticspollutionsocial construction
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook for the Anthropology of Gender and Sexuality , pp. 126 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Adolfsson, L., Nziengui, H., Abreu, I. N., Šimura, J., Beebo, A., Herdean, A., Aboalizadeh, J., Široká, J., Moritz, T., Novák, O., Ljung, K., Schoefs, K., and Spetea, C. (2017). Enhanced secondary- and hormone metabolism in leaves of arbuscular mycorrhizal Medicago truncatula. Plant Physiology, 175(1), 392–411.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Agrawal, A. (1995). Dismantling the divide between indigenous and scientific knowledge. Development and Change, 26(3), 413–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ah-King, M., and Hayward, E. (2014). Toxic sexes – perverting pollution and queering hormone disruption. O-zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, 1, 1–12.Google Scholar
Albert, B. (1989). Yanomami “violence”: inclusive fitness or ethnographer’s representation? Current Anthropology, 30(5), 637–40.Google Scholar
Albert, B. (1990). On Yanomami warfare: rejoinder. Current Anthropology, 31(5), 558–63.Google Scholar
Åsberg, C., and Lykke, N. (2010). Feminist technoscience studies. European Journal of Women’s Studies, 17(4), 299–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Barnack-Tavlaris, J. L., Hansen, K., Levitt, R. B., and Reno, M. (2019). Taking leave to bleed: perceptions and attitudes toward menstrual leave policy. Health Care for Women International, 40(12), 1355–73.Google Scholar
Bashford, A., and Levine, P. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, J. (2009). Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Bentley, P. J. (1998). Comparative Vertebrate Endocrinology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bersani, L. (2010). Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Bordo, S. (2004). Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Brassier, R. (2011). Concepts and objects. In Bryant, L., Srnicek, N., and Harman, G., eds., The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, pp. 47–65.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (1990). Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Butler, J. (2004). Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Carron, D. (2014). The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Chagnon, N. (1990). On Yanomami violence: reply to Albert. Current Anthropology, 31(1), 49–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chagnon, N. A., and Hames, R. B. (1979). Protein deficiency and tribal warfare in Amazonia: new data. Science, 203(4383), 910–13.Google Scholar
Chamorro-García, R., Sahu, M., Abbey, R. J., Laude, J., Pham, N., and Blumberg, B. (2013). Transgenerational inheritance of increased fat depot size, stem cell reprogramming, and hepatic steatosis elicited by prenatal exposure to the obesogen tributyltin in mice. Environmental Health Perspectives, 121(3), 359–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Clifford, J., and Marcus, G., eds., (1986). Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California PressGoogle Scholar
Costacurta, A., and Vanderleyden, J. (1995). Synthesis of phytohormones by plant-associated bacteria. Critical Reviews in Microbiology, 21(1), 1–18.Google Scholar
Counihan, C. (1999). The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power. Hove: Psychology Press.Google Scholar
Davis-Floyd, R. (1992). Birth as an American Rite of Passage. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Davis-Floyd, R., and Dumit, J., eds. (1998). Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Descola, P. (1986). La nature domestique: symbolisme et praxis dans l’écologie des Achuar. Paris: Maisons des Sciences de l’Homme.Google Scholar
Descola, P. (2005). Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
Di Chiro, G. 2010. Polluted politics? Confronting toxic discourse, sex panic and eco-normativity. In Mortimer-Sandilands, C. and Erickson, B., eds., Queer Ecologies, Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 199–230.Google Scholar
Dreger, A. (2011). Darkness’s descent on the American Anthropology Association: a cautionary tale. Human Nature 22, 225–46.Google Scholar
Dreger, A., Feder, E. K., and Tamar-Mattis, A. (2012). Prenatal dexamethasone for congenital adrenal hyperplasia: an ethics canary in the modern medical mine. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 9(3), 277–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
DuPuis, E. M. (2002). Nature’s Perfect Food: How Milk Became America’s Drink. New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Eckstein, A. (2016). Documenting transition, transforming gender: the worldmaking work of trans men on YouTube. MA thesis, University of Colorado.Google Scholar
Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Fausto-Sterling, A. (1992). Building two-way streets: the case of feminism and science. NWSA Journal, 4(3), 336–349.Google Scholar
Ferguson, R. B. (1995). Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité. Vol. 1: La volonté de savoir. Paris: Gallimard.Google Scholar
France, D. (2016). How to Survive a Plague: The Story of How Activists and Scientists Tamed AIDS. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Fritsch, K. (2010). Intimate assemblages: disability, intercorporeality, and the labour of attendant care. Critical Disability Discourses/Discours Critiques Dans le Champ du Handicap, 2, 1–14.Google Scholar
Gaard, G. (2013). Toward a feminist postcolonial milk studies. American Quarterly, 65(3), 595–618.Google Scholar
Gilbert, S. F. (2000). Developmental Biology, 6th edition. Sunderland, MA: Sinauer Associates.Google Scholar
Gilbert, S. F. (2002). The genome in its ecological context: philosophical perspectives on interspecies epigenesis. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 981(1), 202–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gilbert, S. F. (2009). The adequacy of model systems for evo-devo: modeling the formation of organisms/modeling the formation of society. In Barberousse, A., Morange, M., and Pradeu, T., eds., Mapping the Future of Biology: Evolving Concepts and Theories. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 57–68.Google Scholar
Gilbert, S. F. (2011). Expanding the temporal dimensions of developmental biology: the role of environmental agents in establishing adult-onset phenotypes. Biological Theory, 6(1), 65–72.Google Scholar
Gilbert, S. F., Bosch, T. C., and Ledón-Rettig, C. (2015). Eco-evo-devo: developmental symbiosis and developmental plasticity as evolutionary agents. Nature Reviews Genetics, 16(10), 611–22.Google Scholar
Gilbert, S. F., McDonald, E., Boyle, N., Buttino, N., Gyi, L., Mai, M., Prakash, N., and Robinson, J. (2010). Symbiosis as a source of selectable epigenetic variation: taking the heat for the big guy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1540), 671–8.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Guthman, J. (2011). Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Guthman, J., and DuPuis, M. (2006). Embodying neoliberalism: economy, culture, and the politics of fat. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24(3), 427–48.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. Feminist Studies, 14, 575–99.Google Scholar
Haraway, D. (2016). Manifestly Haraway. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Hardie, D. G. (1991). Biochemical Messengers: Hormones, Neurotransmitters and Growth Factors. London: Chapman & Hall.Google Scholar
Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.Google Scholar
Harjunen, H. (2016). Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body: The Fat Body in Focus. New York: Taylor & Francis.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harris, M. (1975). Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches: The Riddles of Culture. London: Hutchinson & Co.Google Scholar
Hayes, Tyrone, et al. (2010). Diversifying the biological sciences: past efforts and future challenges. Molecular Biology of the Cell, 21(22), 3767–9.Google Scholar
Holbraad, M., and Pedersen, M. (2017). The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoover, E. (2018). Environmental reproductive justice: intersections in an American Indian community impacted by environmental contamination. Environmental Sociology, 4(1), 8–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoover, E., Cook, K., Plain, R., Sanchez, K., Waghiyi, V., Miller, P., Dufault, R., Sislin, C., and Carpenter, D. O. (2012). Indigenous peoples of North America: environmental exposures and reproductive justice. Environmental Health Perspectives, 120(12), 1645–9.Google Scholar
Horiguchi, T. (2006). Masculinization of female gastropod mollusks induced by organotin compounds, focusing on mechanism of actions of tributyltin and triphenyltin for development of imposex. Environmental Sciences: An International Journal of Environmental Physiology and Toxicology, 13(2), 77–87.Google ScholarPubMed
Huxley, J. (1945). Evolution: The Modern Synthesis. London: George Allen & Unwin.Google Scholar
Ingold, T., and Palsson, G. (2013). Biosocial Becomings: Integrating Social and Biological Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jonas, H. (1984). The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of Ethics for the Technological Age. Chicago: Chicago University Press.Google Scholar
Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Keller, E. F. (1982). Feminism and science. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 7(3), 589–602. https://doi.org/10.1086/493901.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kulick, D. (1998). Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2013). An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Levine, P. (2012). Anthropology, colonialism and eugenics. In Bashford, A. and Levine, E., eds., The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–61.Google Scholar
Lock, M., and Palsson, G. 2016. Can Science Resolve the Nature/Nurture Debate? Cambridge: Polity.Google Scholar
Longino, H. E. (1990). Feminism and philosophy of science. Journal of Social Philosophy, 21(2–3), 150–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Luck, M. (2014). Hormones: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University PressGoogle Scholar
MacCormack, C., and Strathern, M. (1980). Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Mackendrick, N. (2014). More work for mother: chemical body burdens as a maternal responsibility. Gender and Society 28(5), 705–28.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, C. A., Lockridge, A., and Keith, M. (2005). Declining sex ratio in a First Nation community. Environmental Health Perspectives, 113(10), 1295–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Malabou, C. (2012). The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Malm, A. (2017). The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Martin, E. (1987). The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Mascia-Lees, F. E., and Black, N. J. (2016). Gender and Anthropology, 2nd ed. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.Google Scholar
McFall-Ngai, M. (2017). Noticing microbial worlds: the postmodern synthesis in biology. In Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Gan, E., and Bubandt, N., eds., Arts of Living on a Dangerous Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 51–69.Google Scholar
McFall-Ngai, M., Hadfield, M. G., Bosch, T. C. G., et al. (2013). Animals in a bacterial world, a new imperative for the life sciences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 110(9), 3229–36.Google Scholar
McFall-Ngai, M. J., and Ruby, E. G. (1998). Sepiolids and vibrios: when first they meet. BioScience, 48(4), 257–65.Google Scholar
Murphy, M. (2008). Chemical regimes of living. Environmental History, 13(4), 695–703.Google Scholar
Murphy, M. (2013). Chemical infrastructure of the St Clair River. In Boudia, S. and Jas, N., eds., Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945. London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. 103–15.Google Scholar
Ortner, S. (1974). Is male to female as nature is to culture? Feminist Studies, 1(2), 5–31.Google Scholar
Overstreet, K. (2019). “A well-cared for cow produces more milk”: the biotechnics of (dis)assembling cow bodies in Wisconsin dairy worlds. PhD diss., Aarhus University.Google Scholar
Palsson, G. (2016). Unstable bodies: biosocial perspectives on human variation. The Sociological Review, 64, 100–16.Google Scholar
Poiani, A. 2010. Animal Homosexuality: A Biosocial Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Preciado, P. B. 2013. Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era. New York: Feminist Press.Google Scholar
Prosser, J. (1998). Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Rapp, R. (1999). Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Reiter, R., ed. (1975). Toward an Anthropology of Women. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Rohy, V. (2014). Lost Causes: Narrative, Etiology and Queer Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z. (1980). The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5(3), 389–417.Google Scholar
Rosaldo, M. Z., Lamphere, L., and Bamberger, J. (1974). Woman, Culture, and Society. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Sahlins, M. (1976). The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Salmon, G. (2017). On ontological delegation: the birth of neoclassical anthropology. In Salmon, G., Charbonnier, P., and Skafish, P., eds., Comparative Metaphysics: Ontology after Anthropology. London: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 41–60.Google Scholar
Sanabria, E. (2016). Plastic Bodies: Sex Hormones and Menstrual Suppression in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Santillo, D., Johnston, P. and Langston, W. J. (2001). Tributyltin (TBT) antifoulants: a tale of ships, snails and imposex. In European Environment Agency, Late Lessons from Early Warnings: The Precautionary Principle 1896–2000, Environmental issue report No 22. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, pp. 135–48.Google Scholar
Scott, D. N. (2012). Pollution and the body boundary: exploring scale, gender and remedy. In Richardon, J. and Rackley, E., eds., Feminist Perspectives on Tort Law. London: Routledge, pp. 55–79.Google Scholar
Shapiro, N., and Kirksey, E. (2017). Chemo-ethnography: an introduction. Cultural Anthropology, 32(4), 481–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smuts, B. (1995). The evolutionary origins of patriarchy. Human Nature, 6(1), 1–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Strathern, M. (1988). The Gender of the Gift: Problems with Women and Problems with Society in Melanesia. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Strier, K. B. (2003). Primate behavioral ecology: from ethnography to ethology and back. American Anthropologist, 105(1), 16–27.Google Scholar
Toren, C. (1999). Mind, Materiality and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Tsing, A. L., Mathews, A. S., and Bubandt, N. (2019). Patchy Anthropocene: landscape structure, multispecies history, and the retooling of anthropology: an introduction to Supplement 20. Current Anthropology, 60(S20), S186–S197.Google Scholar
Turner, M. G., Gardner, R. H., and O’Neill, R. V. (2001). Landscape Ecology in Theory and Practice. New York: Springer.Google Scholar
Tremain, S. (2017). Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Underwood, M. (2017). Exploring the social lives of image and performance enhancing drugs: an online ethnography of the Zyzz fandom of recreational bodybuilders. International Journal of Drug Policy, 39, 78–85.Google Scholar
Woese, C. R. (2004). A new biology for a new century. Microbiology and Molecular Biology Reviews, 68(2), 173–86.Google Scholar
Wolfendale, P. (2014). Object-Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes. Falmouth: Urbanomic.Google Scholar
Worthman, C. P. (1995). Hormones, sex, and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 593–617.Google Scholar
Zizek, S. (2014). Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×