Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024)
Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosterone” for muscle growth or the tired cliché of attributing women’s moods to menstruation, a wide range of lesser-known hormones has entered public discourse and social media. From productivity hacks centered around mastering dopamine, to flat belly guides promising results through balancing cortisol, to Prozac advertisements framing happiness through serotonin increase, an expanding range of health and lifestyle practices is being described in hormonal terms. Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary, written by an interdisciplinary collective of authors, offers a conceptual toolkit for critically exploring “hormonalization” of health and its both normalizing and subversive effects.
Structured into nineteen alphabetically arranged entries—each devoted to an endogenous or synthetic hormone, or to a substance that triggers hormonal cascades—the book offers a subversive counterpoint to conventional biomedical glossaries, where hormones are typically defined as chemical messengers secreted by specialized cells or glands, traveling through body fluids to regulate physiological processes in target cells or tissues. Here, hormones are understood as material-semiotic actors that cascade beyond the signalling pathways of individual bodies. Authors explore what hormones do as they flow across the biosocial: through bodies, pharmaceutical policies, public health, self-care and therapeutic practices, reproductive institutions, anti-gender discourse, and biohacking cultures—both shaping and being shaped in these cascades.
The chapters vary in genre and methodology: discursive analyses are followed by ethnographic depictions that are interleaved by more experimental forms of an auto-partography or a rebellious patient information leaflet. While UK- and US-based cases dominate, they are complemented by ethnographies from Brazil, Poland, and France, as well as a decolonial essay drawing on Māori language. The alphabetical structure leaves readers the freedom to read in multiple ways. I suggest, however, a reading thread that follows the ambivalence that runs throughout: the oscillation between the oppressive and the potentially subversive work of hormonal cascades.
The politics of hormones: from normalization to subversion
The book’s central argument can be distilled as follows: the normalizing and subversive effects of hormones pivot on how they are enacted. As long as hormones are approached as intra-bodily chemical entities, they risk reinforcing ideas of bodily normalcy, gender binary, heteronormative reproduction, and productivity, naturalizing certain embodiments while marginalizing others. In contrast, subversion or even rebellion happens when hormones are enacted as biosocial actors cascading across the long-separated realms of knowledge production: the biological and the social, challenging their boundaries.
Several chapters elaborate on the normalizing part: Tom Boylston explores the hormonal cascades on the neoliberal market and their imbrications with individualism’s appeal to personal responsibility as time-management products are sold to master dopamine. Other entries elucidate on empowering practices. Roslyn Malcolm’s ethnography of horse-assisted therapy for neurodivergent people in the UK follows cortisol as it moves across senses and settings, causing stress while also conveying their sensory experience to neurotypical people—it is enacted as embodied evidence of biosociality.
The experimental chapters perform hormonal rebellion by their subversive format: Cronan Cronshaw’s contribution on gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogues (puberty blockers) enters the heated debates over the rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria. Presented in the form of an experimental patient information leaflet, his piece puts the boundaries between the biological and social on its head. Instead of listing physiological effects and side effects, it highlights social consequences such as accusations of poor parenting or charges of gender essentialism.
Other entries on sex hormones (mifepristone, human chorionic gonadotropin, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, DDT) offer more foreseeable discourse analysis of the political cascades that hormones catalyse in conservative settings about abortion or gender binaries. In contrast, the richest chapters are those that capture nuance from the ethnographic depths, where normalization and subversion coexist. Andrea Ford draws on her ethnographic experience of doula training in family childbirth clinic in California to explore how the use of Pitocin (a synthetic form of oxytocin) constructs the ideal of “natural” labour without technological intervention, yet accessible only to those who can afford private clinics. Magdalena Radkowska-Walkowicz’s ethnography of growth hormone prescriptions to young girls with Turner syndrome in Poland follows how bodies are both normalized through growth hormone while also bringing hope and promise of a better future. In Bahia, Brazil, Fabiola Rohden documents how testosterone prescriptions for menopausal women decouple the hormone from masculinity, reframing it as a source of desire and vitality—yet careful dosing still reinscribes femininity’s aesthetic boundaries.
Towards hormonal thinking
While some entries would have benefited from greater elaboration or more specific empirical examples—rather than remaining at the level of quite general discourse analysis—the strength of Hormonal Theory lies in its conceptual ambition. It is not merely a glossary of singular hormones; it presents an outlinetowards “hormonal thinking” as a distinctive analytical approach. This enables medical anthropology to trace how “the social gets under the skin” (Pollock, p. 28), while also accounting for how the reductive biochemical models have obscured hormonal biosociality, offering a politically vibrant account of hormonal health.
By treating hormones as biosocial actors rather than intrabodily chemical messengers, the contributors open new pathways for examining the entanglements of embodiment, politics, and knowledge production. In this sense, hormonal thinkingholds a similar analytical promise to Hannah Landecker’s metabolic thinking: both explore how biomedically conceptualised entities shape bodies biosocially and how these entities (metabolism, hormones) are simultaneously reshaped as they flow through the biosocial.
Yet Landecker’s metabolic thinking (2011, 2013, 2024) goes further in exploring how within biomedical research itself metabolism has been reconceptualized to integrate the social. Her detailed account of the history of biology prevents metabolism from slipping into just a metaphor, keeping it anchored in the shifting biotechnological and conceptual work of the life sciences. By contrast, Hormonal Theory sometimes (especially in the chapters drawing solely on discourse analysis) foregrounds the social at the expense of the biological’s own complexity, risking a drift toward the metaphorical, where the materiality of hormones is lost and biomedicine is dismissed as “the enemy of critical thought” (cf. Niewöhner & Lock, 2018). Taking inspiration from Landecker’s method could help hormonal thinking problematise the bios as well, not to take the biomedical accounts as immediate, but rather to explore how hormones are themselves materially and semiotically transformed within contemporary biomedical research. In other words, how does biomedicine attend to the biosociality of hormones?
The task ahead for hormonal thinking is thus to trace the biosocial hormonal cascades within biomedicine as well. That is, to explore their intra-actions not only with politics of inequalities but with other hormones —mapping how different biosocial hormonal cascades intra-sect, modulate, or destabilize each other’s effects co-constituting not only bodies, health and illness, but also the politics that shapes them.
References
Landecker, H. 2011. Food as Exposure: Nutritional Epigenetics and the New Metabolism. BioSocieties 6(2): 167–194.
Landecker, H. 2013. Postindustrial Metabolism: Fat Knowledge. Public culture 25(3): 495–522.
Landecker, H. 2024. How the Social Gets Under the Skin: From the Social as Signal to Society as a Metabolic Milieu. Köln Z Soziol, 76, 745–767.
Niewöhner, J. & Lock, M. 2018. Situating local biologies: Anthropological perspectives on environment/human entanglements. BioSocieties 13, 681–697.
