Hormonal Methods
Wednesday, September 24, 1–2:30pm | Taft Research Center
Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormone cycles are idealized and whose hormonal imbalances are criminalized, pathologized, and fetishized—and to what social and political ends? How do these relations of power manifest as visual, material objects and images? And how have artists questioned the very idea of a “hormonally constructed body” (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? This lecture centers artists’ radical experimentation with hormonal fluctuations (related to stress, pregnancy, sleep, inflammation, gender identity, metabolism, aging, etc.) and posits that hormones don’t merely modulate our bodies, but instead function as socio-political cultural artifacts. I argue that the ways that such artifacts are manufactured and managed—through state-authorized laws as much by means of fugitive, collective aid and “off label” use—constitutes hormonality, a structural process through which the expression of hormonal management operates as a regulatory technology and a framework for solidarity work and pirate care. Through a close reading of contemporary artist, Mary Maggic’s somatic abolitionist praxis, exemplified in their Open Source Estrogen workshops, I propose a shared critical vocabulary for apprehending the state-sanctioned surveillance of hormonal knowledge and methods for coming to know collectivized hormonal experimentation long part of DIY guerrilla medicine, trans technologies, and mutual aid care networks.
Faye Gleisser is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Critical Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she is an interdisciplinary art historian and curator of 20th and 21st century art, specializing in critical historiographies of risk-taking, somatic knowledge, and the visual and material histories of racial formation, surveillance, and lawfare in art and museums. Her first book, Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967-1987 (University of Chicago Press, 2023) won the 2024 ASAP Book Prize.