The most revolutionary aspect of the concept of sex hormones is the idea that sex is not restricted to the world of living organisms. Since the early decades of the twentieth century even chemicals have had a sex of their own. In their journals and textbooks scientists discuss male sex hormones, female sex hormones and heterosexual hormones as a reality that simply exists in nature. I became really intrigued by this image of sex hormones. Even today the naturalistic reality of sex hormones is often taken for granted, as is exemplified in Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae:
Lust and aggression are fused in male hormones. Anyone who doubts this has probably never spent much tune around horses.
(Paglia 1991:24)
This uncritical acceptance of female and male sex hormones as natural facts is related to the positivistic notion that science describes the world as it is. Constructivist approaches in science studies, however, brought the critical awareness that scientists do not describe reality, but that they create realities. This approach is most vividly portrayed in Ian Hacking’s (1986) Representing and Intervening in which he describes the laboratory sciences in terms of their power to create artefacts: phenomena that did not exist prior to the intervention of laboratory scientists. In the words of Hacking:
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Laboratory science…involves the creation of phenomena: the purification and stabilization of phenomena that cannot exist in pure condition in the universe. In the laboratory, phenomena can be maintained, be recalled if interesting, be forgotten, or be transformed in ready made transferable technologies. This idea of purification, creation, and regulation of phenomena (including the world we live in) implies thinking and theorizing over the material reality. In addition, it implies interaction with reality, and, in a non-metaphorical sense, the recreation of this reality. What I address here is not the construction of facts as facts (metaphorically speaking), but the calling into existence of events and regularities.
In this constructivist approach sex hormones do not simply exist in nature, they are literally created by laboratory scientists. Or to quote Hacking again:
We did not find sex hormones somewhere in a lost corner, like a desert island lost in the mist. We ourselves called sex hormones into existence.
(Hacking 1989:21)
What Hacking describes here is precisely what science makes so powerful: its capacity to create new things and new worlds. By doing this, laboratory sciences establish a material authority that is very dominant in our present culture. The new science of sex endocrinology established its material authority by transforming the theoretical concept of sex hormones into material realities: chemical substances with a sex of their own. By selecting specific methods of testing, scientists defined which substances they would label as “male” or “female.”
The role of experiments in sex endocrinology did not, however, remain restricted to the laboratory. Sex endocrinologists enhanced their material authority by transferring the test methods developed in the laboratory to the clinic. Reconstructing the role of experiments in sex endocrinology, this chapter describes how disciplinary styles interact with laboratory practices, thus structuring the manner in which scientists give meaning to sex and the body, in both the laboratory and the clinic. In the process of testing, sex endocrinologists became more and more removed from common-sense opinions about sex and reshaped the meanings of masculinity and femininity.