Hormonal stories: a new materialist exploration of hormonal emplotment in four case studies.

During Malcolm’s long-term participant observation in the UK and USA with autistic children, adults, and their families, and practitioners of an autism-specific form of horse therapy, she encountered stories that exemplify how hormones come to be framed as environmentally situated and relational agents. As shown below, these stories situated autistic experience in affective and architectural environments, embodied sensory difference, “fight or flight” responses and hormonal flows in the blood (Malcolm 2019 , 2021 ). This model reframed autism as an embodied, emplaced (Howes 2005 ) condition enacted in social relations rather than a disorder of the individual body. It decentred the neurological as the site of the condition. Speaking to the key thread of argumentation weaving our patchwork of stories together, hormones, via their role in the “fight or flight” response were key actors in this reframing of autism. Through detailing the hacking of hormones, [Author’s name]’s practitioner interlocutors engaged with authoritative biological models of the body, yet simultaneously challenged simple biologisation of the condition. Stories representing the lives of one very specific kind of (‘high functioning’, savant) autistic person have abounded in film and television over the last few decades (Murray 2008 ). Yet as the saying goes, when you know one autistic person, you know one autistic person. More recently, the burgeoning genre of autistic autobiography has given increased public access to the lived experience of the condition. This communicates an emerging narrative of being autistic that foregrounds embodied sensory difference. Autistic self-advocacy and neurodiversity movements have grown in strength, advocating for the reconfiguration of autism as a form of difference, a way of being in the world. Indeed, after years of lobbying, the Autism Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN) successfully advocated for sensory idiosyncrasies to be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) that defines the condition for the first time. This was a positive move in acknowledging autistic embodiments, yet sensory experience arguably entered the DSM-5 (APA 2013 ) criteria framed as a form of pathology. This highlights how advocates must negotiate within the parameters of narratives they may seek to trouble, something reflected in how hormones were mobilised in the context of horse therapy. Some stories about autism are taken up and promoted widely, and others silenced. As a category, ‘autism’ continues to be bound up in the configuration of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ forms of sociality and communication within authoritative biomedical, and lay, knowledges (Hollin 2014 ) affecting which stories circulate more easily than others. The well documented—and ongoing—tensions between neurodiversity and deficit models of the condition (Broderick and Ne’eman 2008 ) constrain the flows of particular knowledges, ultimately affecting to what end such stories are mobilised—and arguably who or what becomes responsibilised. For the practitioners that [Author’s name] got to know, hormonal cascades within the body became powerfully salient. This was via their ability to articulate the effects of particular sensory architectures on “fight or flight systems” that some of [Author’s name]’s autistic interlocutors used as a way to articulate their experience of being autistic. Practitioners narrated the perceived therapeutic efficacy of equine therapy in getting to know the “good” and “bad sensory triggers” of each client, before carefully choreographing calming horseback embodiments and environments around these particular individual sensitivities. Another scale was added to this therapeutic ecology by imbuing it with the aura of hormonal flows that biologised and molecularised the condition. Heightened sensory sensitivities could lead to activation of the “fight, flight or freeze” response. After which, as practitioner and trainer, Amy puts it. the amygdala is activated. Danger, danger, danger. Cortisol, cortisol, cortisol. At a certain point, if the amygdala is being continually activated… this person will start to experience too high levels of cortisol. Here, the practitioner chimes with what scholar and autistic advocate, Damian Milton, has called the “negative spiral of stress” ( 2013 ). Oxytocin was perceived to be able to counteract these flows. the amygdala is activated. Danger, danger, danger. Cortisol, cortisol, cortisol. At a certain point, if the amygdala is being continually activated… this person will start to experience too high levels of cortisol. As Amy puts it, and in a particularly moralising tone, “cortisol is our enemy, and oxytocin is our friend”. For Amy, riding horses was so beneficial for autistic children “because of the oxytocin being produced”. Hormones were being hacked via horses’ movement and enabling more sensorially sensitive environs. Rebalancing cortisol and oxytocin flows was not assumed to offer any kind of ‘fix’ or state of constancy, but an ongoing, weekly space for calm and embodied communication through the provision of more sensitively designed affective and architectural spaces. As we argue here and in line with work elsewhere (Malcolm et al., forthcoming), hormones are key protagonists in how we understand not only the body in health and ill-health, but experiences of self and relations to others. Appeals to the “fight or flight” response (a central component in the excitation of hormonal flows) are increasingly common in lay narratives about health; particularly as ways to articulate stress and burn out. Emplotted in the context of an autism-specific method of horse therapy (AM) were stories about a particularly active fight or flight response in autistic people resulting from sensory sensitivities. This response was understood to be triggered by unpredictable environments and sensorially toxic spaces such as schools and supermarkets populated with continually flashing strip lighting, loud unpredictable noises, and chemical odours. In the context of horse therapy, this emerging emplaced, hormonal story is situated within a ‘therapeutic ecology’ co-constructed in varied ways by practitioners and autistic participants of horse therapy (Malcolm 2021 ). This gives an entry into the complex model of autism being enacted through the practices of equine therapy. That is, the mobilisation of biomedical knowledges in articulating kinds of difference and the resonances across scales of the situated body-person-world (Latimer 2011 ) bound up in interlocutors’ perceptions of therapeutic efficacy. Efficacy was crafted by practitioners around an understanding of autism as a deeply embodied condition, and one enacted through the inhabited environment (Malcolm 2019 ). Hormones were emplotted as the fluid connection between various scales of the body required to articulate such a complex model of the body and self in relations with other selves and environments. Their role was to provide a nexus for the body-person-world. For the autistic and non-autistic people in this context, autistic experience was not situated in individual brains, it involved multiple interrelated processes of the mind/body/brain and environment. While this sensory-limbic model was used by Malcolm’s autistic interlocutors, they did not tell hormonal stories about autism. Yet, practitioners of AM appealed to the authoritative language of hormones, stating that hormones played a key role in wellbeing for autistic children and adults and tinkering with hormonal flows could enhance wellbeing. The idea of hormonal cascades offered a powerful heuristic to encapsulate the complexly shifting, looping scales and partial connections of body-person-worlds (Malcolm 2019 ; Latimer 2011 ) mobilised in this story of autism—and relatedly therapeutic efficacy—being told in relation to and through the actions of hormones. Autistic ways of being were narrated as a product of an interplay of endocrine, peripheral, and central nervous systems of the body emplaced with the built and social environment. The bounded, individual ‘body proper’ therefore fails to offer a comprehensive account of local understandings of the phenomenon in focus. As Haraway asks “why should the body end at the skin?” ( 1991 , p. 22). To make the body a topic for anthropological and sociological inquiry today is to ask how it is lived; how is it constructed, imagined, and subjectively known (Lock and Farquhar 2007 ). The body was subjectively known as irreducibly situated in a heightened worldly sensitivity that Manning ( 2013 ) calls autistic perception. This was articulated via processes of the limbic system and the “fight, flight, freeze” response. Yet, through these authoritative biomedical knowledges, a clear message was conveyed that environments played as significant a role in the creation of anxiety, and ultimately chronic stress experienced by autistic people, speaking to what Shakespeare and Watson ( 2001 ) have termed an embodied ontology of disability. As we have noted, hormones are defined by their activity and named in reflection of their role ‘to excite’ and ‘set in motion’. They flow and enact relations and intra-actions (Barad 2007 ), not only of bodily processes but also situated embodiments. This very property of movement, alongside their increasing salience in popular understandings of the body, allowed hormones to flow in and provide an alternative pool for reflection on autistic experience, moving across scales of inside and outside, self and other, and articulating the situated character of the ongoing anxieties and stress all too often lived by autistic people. Stories with hormones as key protagonists—building on highly salient contemporary narratives of “fight or flight”—were used to communicate the sensory-perceptual situatedness of one’s lived experience, yet these stories simultaneously identified these phenomena in biologised and individualised bodily flows, reproducing normalising molecular narratives around autistic ‘malfunction’. This highlights complexities and tensions emerging through the telling of hormone stories, the normative constructions of the pathological reproduced, yet also the novel bodily analogies articulated as a form of resistance to authoritative knowledges enacted through and with hormones.

While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ representing the prospect of controlling central life processes, from reproduction to respiration to sleep, the technoscientific and socio-cultural context of today has fundamentally shifted how hormones are understood and what roles they perform in the world. In the last few decades, the ‘master molecule’ vision of hormones has arguably been backgrounded with new and emerging biomedical developments such as neurotransmitters, gene-based biotechnology and omics. Yet, drawing from empirical data from four distinct contexts, we argue that hormones and hormone stories are in ascendency, as hormones increasingly feature in stories and practices that have profound influence on people’s lived experiences and inhabited worlds (see Horgan and Dickson 2020 ). These hormone stories challenge dominant biomedical models of bodies and expectations around how people ‘fit’ within dominant models of bodily experience, and they articulate how biological bodies, forms, and processes become situated in their various environs. By building on new materialist frameworks that configure hormones as active and agentic entities that ‘provoke’ biosocial phenomena, including narratives that build meaning into the world, we have explored the new kinds of protagonists that hormones are today in stories told about bodies, selves, and the environments they inhabit. In so doing, we have shown that hormones actively participate in the narrative emplotment of reality through which meaning is generated, including by arousing or putting into action successions of events that form (and are interpreted as) a plot. By bringing together hormone stories from four different research projects, we have woven together a thread that highlights not only the multifaceted narrative provocations that hormones incite today, but also how these narrative provocations do diverse kinds of social and biological, personal, and political work. Across these four research projects, hormones sit at the intersection of dominant biomedical narratives and alternative narratives that attribute different roles to them than those posited by medical discourses. In these contexts, hormones are mobilised to hack bodies, and in so doing hack notions of what particular bodies are or can be. Hormones are thus the subjects of multiple contested stories in which they act as both agents of and sites of resistance against the medicalisation of bodies and behaviours. In these new kinds of stories, using or not using hormonal technologies and hacking into or tinkering with hormones is positioned as enabling an intervention into biological or embodied processes as well as social, cultural, and political ones. Hormones are thereby made protagonists in and across the overlapping realms of the personal and the political. They act as catalysts for cascades of effects that flow in and through the body in environmentally situated, relational ways. Contemporary hormonal narratives make hormones into links connecting different realms of life—body, self, societybiology—as they multiply and provoke. In the Swedish women’s accounts about hormonal contraceptives, hormones play central roles in multiple narratives of ‘control’ that were invoked and mobilised in relation to hormonal contraceptives as a gendered technology that acts on the body to arouse physical effects and to shape one’s sense of self in affective ways. While the women drew from dominant biomedical narratives that position hormonal contraceptives as an empowering technology that enables control over women’s presumed fickle reproductive bodies and risky fertility, they also challenged and undermined these dominant narratives. In doing so, they produce alternative conceptualisations of what ‘control’ in the context of contraception is or should entail, shaped by hormones’ ability to act on the body in undesired as well as in desired ways. These contraceptive stories and experiences highlight the complex material-discursive processes through which hormonal enactments and contraceptive meanings are made, and remade. Conversely, in the promissory future-oriented narratives emplotted by ‘gender hackers’ and radical trans health activists, hormones invoke emancipatory gender politics and better future worlds where hormones act as sites of empowerment that should be liberated from the sphere of control that medical institutions and gatekeepers currently exercise over them. Like the Swedish women’s narratives of hormonal contraceptives, gender hacking narratives frame control over hormone technologies away from authoritative medical narratives about gendered bodies, but here hormones act explicitly as subversive protagonists that can be harnessed to resist medicalised control. They are attributed with the power to ‘hack’ into the medicalised binary gender system to re-make bodies and social relations beyond the gender binary, where their subversive potential is attached both to their ability to alter bodies and, relatedly, to their potential to alter the future of gender as a social, cultural and political system. Relatedly, in the hormonal plots of Californian birthing cultures, biomedical stories about how birth hormones work in the body merge with politicised stories about what kinds of environments are best suited to birth and how the experience of giving birth should unfold. In these stories, birth hormones and the cascading effects they can arouse across the body, birthing self, and wider environment come to represent either natural or medicalised childbirth depending on how and where the birth happens. Hormones’ actions are framed as conditioned by the immediate environment in which childbirth occurs, which is, in turn, linked with the wider politics of childbirth. In this way, hormones cascade across the personal and the political, forming a web of links between the body and the wider context in which it is embedded. In the context of autism-specific horse therapy, hormones come to sit at the nexus of body-person-worlds, articulating sensory-limbic experiences linking the body and the self with their wider environment through acting as mediators of a social ontology of autistic experience, human–horse and human–environment relations. While autistic experience itself is emplotted as involving multiple interrelated processes of the mind, body, and brain, hormones took centre stage at the crux of these processes. Biomedical narratives of both autism and hormones were rendered authoritative, yet they were complicated by and mediated through individual experiential, embodied, and environmentally situated stories that re-directed the flow of hormones to these wider ecologies. Collectively, the above patchwork illustrates that hormones continue to be vital protagonists in the stories that are told to make sense of the world today, even while the ‘master controller’ narratives have been complicated by more diffused and nuanced stories of hormones. In the contemporary world where hormones flow with phenomena like genes and omics in the narrative emplotment of life, they emerge in sites of resistance where bodies are hacked, and society and politics are tinkered with. Hormones mediate dynamics of dominant and alternative narratives about bodily experience. They flow and incite cascades across the biomedical, socio-cultural, environmental, personal, political, and regulatory spheres of life, mediating their nexus.

Narrative is deeply ingrained in the conceptual landscape of the humanities and social sciences. Scholars like Plummer ( 1995 ) have demonstrated how social subjects use stories to ‘make meaning’ or to ‘give sense’ both to themselves and the world around them, responding to narratives about others’ experience with narratives of their own (Smith and Sparkes 2011 ). Stories have been theorised as a powerful way of making sense of and imposing order on wider social and cultural systems and processes, including scientific knowledge production. For example, social and cultural narratives are used and appear throughout biomedicine, showing how scientists produce knowledge by telling (often gendered and racialised) stories about phenomena as varied as molecules, conception, different organs, and the immune system (see e.g. Martin 1991 ; Haraway 1991 ). These scientific stories travel unevenly into public understandings and media portrayals, which influence people’s behaviours and understandings of bodies in the world. As understandings of situated bodies change, scientific narratives overlap with, and also diverge from, popular stories and ‘alternative’ expertise, particularly in areas of health. Martin ( 2001 ), for example, explores this in her study of the immune system and metaphors of flexibility at the turn of the century, demonstrating how scientific narratives are merged with and interpreted in relation to other cultural and political narratives—in this case, neoliberal corporate organisation. Hormones, similarly, are ‘made’ and ‘re-made’ through overlapping and cross-fertilising scientific and cultural stories, which help us make sense of what hormones are and what they can do (Erikainen et al 2020 ). Some scholars have carried the storied nature of meaning making directly into the realm of action. Through her use of the notion of ‘emplotment’ in the context of therapeutic encounters, Mattingly ( 1994 ) argues that narrativity, and especially the work of constructing plots out of successions of actions, is a key part of how actors carry out and make meaning out of social action. Social actors are motivated to ‘plot’ their actions into a coherent narrative structure, creating a whole out of a sequence of events, because particular actions take on their meaning by contributing to a larger, unfolding story. It is this ‘making whole’ that creates meaning: actions take on significance when recognised as a part of a wider story that is being constructed. Processes of emplotment are multiply authored—there is no single storyteller but a plurality of actors and actions. In Mattingly’s rendering of emplotment, medical professionals and patients were central actors. In this article, we build on new materialist thinking around the entwinement of the material and cultural, and examine what happens to the notion of narrative when phenomena like hormones are configured as central actors in the emplotment of lived realities. Existing analyses of hormonal narratives serve as a basis for this work, an important example of which is Jordan-Young and Karkazis’ ( 2019 ) analysis of ‘T talk’, which can be understood as social, political, and biomedical storytelling about testosterone. ‘T talk’ weaves folklore into science and science into cultural beliefs, shaping what testosterone becomes, “both as a material substance and as a multivalent cultural symbol” (Jordan-Young and Karkazis 2019 , p. 10). Further, some new materialist thinkers have rethought the construction of narratives through extended notions of textuality where materiality is figured as a kind of ‘writing’, and the body (whether human or otherwise) as a scene of writing (e.g. Kirby 1997 ). Within these kinds of conceptualisations, bodies as well as phenomena like hormones can not only be written but they can also ‘write back’ (Kirby 1997 ), which in turn requires a way of reading materiality that allows it to alter our narratives, making them unstable and shifting. Examples of this line of thinking are Haraway’s figurations of resistant ontology, including the cyborg ( 1991 ) and Oncomouse ( 1997 ) but also figurations such as ‘the human genome’, which turn “body into story, and vice versa, producing both what can count as real and the witness to that reality” ( 1997 , p. 179). Haraway’s figures function as alternative and potent ‘emergent realities’ that enable newly possible bodies, and give rise to a politics of ‘writing otherwise’ that retells dominant narratives about reality through these material-semiotic figures (Haraway 1991 ). Some have taken this onwards through thinking hormones as “forms of social, material, and biological writing” by working with an “expanded notion of what constitutes reading and writing” (Dickinson 2019 ). For example, in his work on “metabolic poetics”, Dickinson ( 2019 , 2018 ) examines endocrine-disrupting chemicals to inquire into how contemporary writers might respond to the capacity of these chemicals to concurrently provoke social as well as biological formations. In his expanded notion of writing, narrative forms such as poetry can function as productive hormone disruptors within the context of wider cultural narratives about hormone disruption. We can concurrently ‘read’ the chemicals in bodily fluids that are materially interfering with our human endocrine systems and rewriting our bodies’ biochemical messages, meaning that in ‘biosemiotic’ terms, endocrine-disrupting chemicals can be understood as a form of writing, including as a form of rewriting our bodies. In what follows, we build on these conceptualisations to examine the dynamism of hormones’ provocations by exploring what shared threads emerge when we consider hormones as key actors in multiple narratives, read together. We consider how hormones act in and across different sites today, both materially and semiotically, simultaneously maintaining old ‘master molecule’ narratives while problematising them. In bringing together insights across four different stories featuring hormonal protagonists, we are interested in the roles that hormones play in the constitution, and engagements, of biological, social, political, spatial, affective, and embodied realities in the contemporary world. In our examples, hormones remain protagonists through (1) acting as agents of control, (2) reconfiguring the gendered body, (3) re-articulating the enduring natural-versus-cultural binary, and (4) making the body a place of congenial social relations through external therapies that hail internal entities. We demonstrate how hormones’ provocations flow in, through, and across multiple ‘realities’ in ways that both solidify and obscure their analytic boundaries.

In the first half of the twentieth century, hormones were figured as life’s ‘master molecules’, representing the prospect of power over the processes of life as well as vast commercial gains from bringing hormone therapies to market (Nordlund 2007 ; Rasmussen 2002 ). Hormones were conceived of as master controllers of life processes, such as respiration in the case of hormones in the adrenal cortex, for example (Rasmussen 2002 ). The expectation was that it would be possible to not only understand human life through analysing hormones, but that endocrinologists would also eventually be able to improve or enhance life through hormonal interventions, including by changing human bodies and behaviours (Nordlund 2007 ). This early ‘master controller’ narrative has especially been analysed in the context of sex endocrinology, where the framing of oestrogen and testosterone as the ‘essence’ of femininity and masculinity, respectively, sparked a hormonally constructed conceptualisation of the body (Oudshoorn 1994 ; Roberts 2007 ). This became not only a central model of thinking about embodied sex and gender difference as hormonally induced but also enabled the commercialised development of oestrogen and testosterone into the most widely used drugs ever produced (Oudshoorn 1994 ). Indeed, as Roberts ( 2007 , p. 26) has observed, the so-called ‘sex hormones’ have been and continue to be understood as central to the (re)production of sexed and gendered bodies, and they are, thus, still “key actors in the production of contemporary ways of being”. Since the second half of the twentieth century, however, the ‘master molecule’ visions around hormones have in many ways been surpassed by molecular genetics and other forms of gene-based biotechnology (Rasmussen 2002 ; Nordlund 2007 ). In recent decades, social science and humanities scholars have applied new materialist theorising to understand sex hormones in ways that aim to disrupt and move beyond conceptual divisions between the social and scientific, and biological and cultural. New materialist thinking emphasises the agency and ontological instability of materiality itself, with thinkers like Haraway ( 1991 ), Kirby ( 1997 ), Barad ( 2007 ), and Hird ( 2019 ) working to rethink the ontology of matter as active, fluid, and shifting rather than inert, fixed, and stagnant, through an engagement with objects conventionally figured as the purview of the natural sciences. In relation to hormones, new materialist frameworks enable hormones to be seen as ‘radically relational’ due to the way in which they work with other entities and flow across conventional conceptual and epistemic boundaries (Roberts 2007 ). Etymologically, ‘hormones’ are those which ‘excite’, ‘arouse’, or ‘put into action’—a potent metaphor not only for their physical, behavioural, and psychological effects, but also their relation to social and cultural stories. As Roberts ( 2007 ) argued, hormones are configured as ‘messengers’ but the questions of exactly what messages they carry and to whom have answers that exceed biological frameworks. They carry not only messages that stimulate cells to create proteins, arousing physiological responses within closed bodily systems, but also, concurrently and in intertwined ways, social and cultural messages that arouse meaning, shaping identities and experiences. Hormonal action cannot be understood without the social and cultural frameworks that make their biological actions meaningful, but they also act directly within the social and cultural, making them “active agents in bio-social systems that constitute material-semiotic entities” (Roberts 2007 , p. 22). They are thus a key example highlighting the need for such conjoined neologisms as biosocial and material-semiotic, which have become ubiquitous in medical humanities and social science. As Irni ( 2013 ) has argued, one should thus analyse not only how different bodies are affected by hormones but also how people are moved or ‘affected’ by them, including the affective dynamics of these hormones in forming a sense of self, and the wider social apparatuses that both enable and restrict the enactments that hormones can perform. These newer frameworks propose an ontology of hormones that highlights their ability to ‘provoke’ phenomena beyond the biological, extending their sphere of activity and influence to the social, cultural, and political. We build on these theoretical framings, centring the narratives that hormones ‘provoke’ as the focus of our analysis. In so doing, our intention is to consider stories as, to borrow from Irni ( 2013 , p. 54), “material-discursive ways in which … hormones … actively work in society”.