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Abstract Contemporary life is taking its toll on sex, according to scientific, environmental and pop-scientific literature. Both women and men are being overwhelmed with estrogens and hormonally active chemicals in their environments – in water, plastics, and food. Such ‘estrogenization’ produces interesting questions about the ‘nature’ of sex, gender and reproduction, and their relations to each other. This paper critically juxtaposes contemporary discourses on estrogenization with feminist work on sex, gender and reproduction. It asks: How might a feminist theorizing of the body take on questions about sex hormones without essentializing sex or reproduction, or underestimating their relevance as biological actors in the production of sex?

Keywords endocrinology, feminism, reproduction, sex, sex hormones

Celia Roberts Lancaster University

Drowning in a Sea of Estrogens: Sex Hormones, Sexual Reproduction and

Sex

Globally today, there is something suspicious in the water, in the air and in the ground that is producing change in human and non-human biological systems. Chemicals that act like estrogens, the so-called ‘environmental estrogens’, are repeatedly named as culprits. Reports of rising infertility in both sexes, of increasing incidence of reproductive cancers in humans, of reproductive system birth defects in children, of tiny penises in alligators, of ‘lesbian’ gulls and intersexed fish, litter the pages of both scientific journals and the mass media (see, for example, Anon, 1994; Lombardi at el., 2001; National Research Council, 1999; Raloff, 1994a, 1994b; Stone, 1994; Sultan et al., 2001; World Wildlife Fund, 1997, 1998). In short, it seems we might all be drowning in a sea of estro- gens.

These reports inform us that men are making much less sperm (Cadbury, 1998: x; Colborn et al., 1996: 173; Friends of the Earth, 2001c; Lombardi

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Sexualities Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Vol 6(2): 195–213[1363-4607(200305)6:2; 195–213; 030526]

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et al., 2001; Raloff, 1994b), women suffer too much estrogen exposure (Stone, 1994), and foetuses and newborns have to struggle against their mother’s hormonally toxic bodies (Riley et al., 1999; Raloff, 1994b; World Wildlife Fund, 1999). To cope with these toxic new ‘facts of life’ (Franklin, 1993: 527–8), assisted conception clinics and laboratories have developed numerous techniques to assist the reproductive activities of both humans and other animals: scarce, immotile or immature sperm are injected directly into egg cytoplasm to make embryos (Winston, 1999); women are hyper- ovulated with large doses of hormones to produce eggs for this procedure (Winston, 1999); animals are produced through the transfer of somatic cell nuclei into de-nucleated egg cells (in ‘Dolly the sheep’ style cloning) (Franklin, 2001a; Nussbaum and Sunstein, 1998); and foetuses are regu- larly scanned for abnormalities (Rapp, 2000). Women are still advised to breastfeed their babies, but reports warn that this process actually leaches toxic chemicals out of women’s bodies into the vulnerable young (Friends of the Earth, 2001a, 2001b; Riley et al., 1999).

Changes associated with the actions of environmental estrogens produce interesting questions about the ‘nature’ of sex, gender and repro- duction, and their relations to each other. If these endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) are producing populations (human and non-human) that are unable to sexually reproduce without assistance, what are the implications for sex and gender? What sort of gender trouble is produced by exposure to EDCs? How might feminist theories of the body take on questions about sex hormones and EDCs without essentializing sex or reproduction, or underestimating their relevance as biological actors in the production of sex?

Reproduction, sex and gender The role of sex hormones in human and non-human animal reproduc- tion and sex (and gender) has been under discussion since the late 19th century, as Nelly Oudshoorn’s Beyond the Natural Body (1994) and Adele Clarke’s Disciplining Reproduction (1998) demonstrate. Since the early 20th century, endocrinology and associated sciences have, at least in part, mobilized the culturally prevalent version of sex differences as antagon- istic ‘opposites’. In this model, masculinity and femininity are ‘opposite’, both in the sense of being different, and in the sense of being opposi- tional or opposed. This was a view developed in early sexology, psycho- analysis and endocrinology amongst other sciences, and is one that, as will become evident in this paper, maintains vitality even today despite scientific evidence that sex hormones do not function in this way.

The ‘founding story’ of endocrinology, as told in mainstream histories, concerns an ageing doctor – Charles Edouard Brown-Séquard – who in

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1889 injected himself with the crushed gonads of guinea pigs in order to revitalize his sexual drive (Medvei, 1982: 289–300). This procedure initiated a new field of medical treatment, known as organotherapy. Based on simple models of sexuality and biological causality, organotherapy advocates asserted that the ‘active ingredients’ in animal gonads (at this time they had not been named as ‘hormones’), could be transferred to human bodies and act as a form of replenishment (Borell, 1976, 1985; Medvei, 1982: 293).

This late 19th century model was developed in the early 20th century by Austrian endocrinologist Eugen Steinach, who experimented with the transplantation of gonads in animals and extrapolated such research into the human realm. In particular, Steinach’s experiments attempted to show that animals undergoing transplantation of gonads of the ‘opposite’ sex became masculinized in the case of females and feminized in the case of males (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 158–163).

Human sexual practice and sexual identity, as Foucault (1987) has argued, were at this time firmly knitted together – homosexual activity, for example, was understood by many sexologists as biologically based. Steinach’s experiments with animal gonads fed directly – in part through his association with radical German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (Wolff, 1986: 140) into sexological understandings of sexual behaviour and identity. Steinach argued that homosexuals were produced by a hermaph- roditic or intermediate gland, and used this theory to justify the implant- ing of the testicular tissue of heterosexual men into homosexual men’s bodies (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 163; Hirschfeld, 1936: 334; Oudshoorn, 1994: 57).

Steinach’s work was taken up in the United States by embryologist Frank R. Lillie, who, as Adele Clarke argues ‘imported endocrinology into the embryology of his day’ by combining the study of hormones with that of genetics (Clarke, 1998: 81). This was a unique and important move in the science of sex determination. Studying cattle, and particularly sterile females of mixed sex twin pairs (called freemartins), Lillie found in 1916–7 that exposure to ‘male’ sex hormones, or androgens, in utero caused genetically female embryos to develop male characteristics (Clarke, 1998: 79–82).

Developing across the first half of the 20th century, research on animal and human in utero development eventually led scientists to argue that the production of sex was a complicated affair in which a convergence between genes, hormones and hormonal environments was required. Mid-century research on rabbits, rats and other animals showed that female foetuses were susceptible to the influence of androgens in their environment; produced either by blood contact with siblings, or through their umbilical contact with their mothers. The female foetus eventually came to be seen as

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developing as the ‘default’ sex only if she did not come to contact with such hormones. Male foetuses, in contrast, developed when ‘male’ hormones diverted this ‘default’ path. Questions concerning the possible impact of the mother’s estrogens (or ‘female’ sex hormones) on the development of the male, as biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling has pointed out, are however, yet to be ‘resolved’ by endocrinologists (Fausto-Sterling, 1995).

As Steinach’s efforts demonstrated, studies of the production of sexed bodies were linked from an early stage with studies of sexual behaviour of animals – human and non-human. The question here was ‘how do sex hormones produce sexed behaviours?’.

In the late 1950s, research by William C. Young and others involving guinea pigs demonstrated a very simple relationship between sex hormones, sex and sexual behaviour: male hormones cause maleness and absence of male hormones causes femaleness. When pregnant guinea pigs were injected with male hormones, the genitalia of their female offspring were ‘masculinized’, and the guinea pigs showed ‘an increase in male-type mounting behaviour and aggressiveness’ (Donovan, 1988: 236). In other studies, male rats were deprived of androgens by castration or by treat- ment with an anti-androgenic drug, resulting in the manifestation of the female pattern of lordosis (the female position adopted during sexual inter- course that is used as the yardstick of feminine sexual behaviour in rats [Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 211–232]).1

In primates, also, scientists demonstrated that sex hormones are related to both ‘gender’ (sexed behaviours) and sexual reproduction. As with guinea pigs and rats, mid to late 20th century primatologists used sexual behaviours (mounting and receptivity) as indices of gender and made arguments about the role of hormones in the production of sex (Adkins- Regan, 1988; Sperling, 1991).

By the 1970s, research in neuroendocrinology and behavioural psychol- ogy had extended this connection to the human realm (Baker, 1980). As feminist theorist Bernice Hausman (2000) and Fausto-Sterling (2000) have demonstrated, much of this research makes unjustifiable leaps between hormones and gendered behaviours (see also Roberts, 2000). In contemporary versions, sexuality and sexual reproduction are involved in these arguments in complex ways.

The bulk of the literature on hormones and gendered behaviours in humans studies children and adults exposed to ‘abnormal’ levels of hormones in utero, in particular girls exposed to high levels of androgens due to a genetic condition known as congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) (Fausto-Sterling 2000: 74–5; Rogers, 1999). Homosexual men and lesbians are also subjects of such investigations – a fact with a long and complex history (Terry, 1999). The approach of most of these studies is to measure a particular set of behaviours – anything from children’s drawing

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(Iijima et al., 2001) and musical ability (Hassler, 1992) to children’s play (Reinisch et al., 1991) and left handedness (McCormick et al., 1990) – and attempting to discover a correlation between prenatal hormonal exposure and the behaviour.

Gender and sexual preferences are intertwined in much of this research, either implicitly or explicitly. This intertwining derives from oppositional understandings of gender and from figurations of homosexualities as forms of ‘intermediate’ positions on this oppositional sex/gender scale; a position attributable to early 20th century sexologists, such as Hirschfeld, and endocrinologists, such as Steinach.

In a systematic literature review of this area, for example, June Macover Reinisch and colleagues examine 19 studies of the behavioral patterns of children and adults exposed to ‘prenatal hormone environments that were atypical for their sex’ (Reinisch et al., 1991: 215). These people’s behav- iours are compared to others’ behaviours who were not exposed to such ‘environments’. The review analyses whether exposed subjects are masculinized, defeminized, feminized, or demasculinized, according to whether or not they exhibit behaviours nominated as either masculine or feminine. Masculinization and feminization are said to occur when the subject shows more of a clearly masculine or feminine behaviour. Demas- culinization or defeminization is said to occur when there is a decrease in a masculine or feminine behaviour that is not necessarily a swing to its ‘opposite’. Clearly, this constitutes an attempt to complexify the notion of masculine and feminine as oppositional. The attempt remains unconvinc- ing, however, as ‘demasculination’ and ‘defeminization’ have no content.

The behaviours studied are listed: feminine behaviours include interest in playing with dolls, interest in appearance and hairstyles, and interest in marriage and maternalism, while masculine behaviours included rough- and-tumble play, aggression, interest in watching sports on TV, and participation in sports. That these categories reflect the social in histori- cally specific ways is not of interest to these researchers. Homo- and heterosexuality are figured indirectly here – for young male subjects, preferring to play with boys is rated as masculine, whereas playing with girls is rated as feminine. In late-adolescence and adulthood, however, ‘this assumption was not made’ (Reinisch et al., 1991: 226).

Reinisch et al. (1991) claim that changes in behaviour are caused by hormonal influences on the infant. Thus, despite an attempt to complex- ify the oppositional gender discourses of earlier endocrinology, these contemporary scientists end up making quite simple claims about the role of hormones in producing sex and gender in humans (Roberts, 2000).

Other research extends these claims more directly to issues of sexual preference and sexual behaviours. Studies by Cheryl McCormick, Sandra Witelson and colleagues, for example, are explicitly based on the extension

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of animal studies regarding sexual behaviour to humans (McCormick et al., 1990; Witelson, 1991). The basic argument is that exposure to sex hormones in utero produces neural differences that are ‘a factor’ in the development of human sexual orientation (McCormick et al., 1990: 69). These studies activate early 20th century models of homosexuality as a form of behavioural and psychological intersexuality – exposure to testos- terone in utero, for example, is seen to contribute to lesbian sexuality in adult life (McCormick et al., 1990).2

Feminist and gay, lesbian and queer theorists have provided substantial critiques of this and similar literatures. Feminist theorists of science, Ruth Doell and Helen Longino’s seminal article on the literature on sex hormones argued that studies of human sexuality were limited by a reliance on a linear model of causation developed within animal studies (a model where chromosomes produce hormonal differences, which cause behav- ioural differences) (Doell and Longino, 1988). The use of this linear model, they contend, erases differences between human and non-human animals, and reduces the influence of the social in human sexuality almost to zero.

Other critics have demonstrated that scientific analyses of homosexuali- ties confuse categories of biology, gender and sexual behaviours. The assumption that all men engaging in sexual behaviours with other men belong to the social category of homosexual men, for example, is simply false. The biological studies of Simon LeVay, which examined the brains of men who have died of AIDS, presuming that these men were ‘homosexual’, and compared them to brains of men who died of other diseases presuming that these men were ‘heterosexual’, were based on this assumption (LeVay, 1991, 1993). The existence of men who have sex with other men, who live and die without HIV infection, and who do not identify as homosexual, renders LeVay’s results nonsensical. The failure to maintain a distinction between sexual identity and sexual practices constitutes one (of a number) of key flaws in such biological studies (Rogers, 1999; Terry, 1999: 378–399).3

Much critical work in the area of biological accounts of homosexuality is historically based. The work of Michel Foucault (1987), Jeffrey Weeks (1986), and more recently, Jennifer Terry (1999), explores the ways in which connections between sexual practices and sexual identities have been actively constructed within medical and scientific practices with the complex participation of many homosexual people. As all of these writers make clear, the understanding of homosexuality as biological that under- pins contemporary endocrinological explanations of sexual preference, developed over the 19th and 20th centuries in tandem with developing understandings of homosexuality as a form of identity. The mixing of categories of identity and sexual practice in contemporary science is, in part at least, an artefact of this history.

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Reproduction and the environment: sex panic! The human and non-human individuals studied by scientists interested in generating endocrinological explanations of sexuality are said to have been exposed to abnormal hormonal environments of a small scale, i.e. their mother’s wombs. Either experimentally induced or produced during ‘natural’ or medical incidents, these environments are singular and curtailed. Turning to another literature altogether, however, we find ourselves swimming in a much bigger sea.

Rachel Carson’s 1972 book, Silent Spring, has become a classic text in the field of environmentalism. Indeed, it is described by many as one of the most important books of the 20th century, and is credited with initi- ating the modern environmental movement (see, for example, McLaugh- lin, 2001). In this book, Carson details the extravagances of mid-20th century agricultural and governmental use of chlorinated hydrocarbons (especially DDT) in the production of food and the control of pests, and the effects of this on plants and animals. In relation to humans, Carson suggests that these chemicals are either directly or indirectly carcinogenic. This indirect route travels, in part at least, via sex hormones. Carson writes:

A substance that is not a carcinogen in the ordinary sense may disturb the normal functioning of some part of the body in such a way that malignancy results. Important examples are the cancers, especially of the reproductive system, that appear to be linked with disturbances of the balance of sex hormones; these disturbances, in turn, may in some cases be the result of some- thing that affects the ability of the liver to preserve a proper level of these hormones. The chlorinated hydrocarbons are precisely the kind of agent that can bring about this kind of indirect carcinogenesis, because all of them are toxic in some degree to the liver. (Carson, 1972: 207)

Chlorinated hydrocarbons, in other words, compromise the liver’s ability to maintain normal levels of hormones, which may lead to cancer. Accord- ingly, Carson cites with approval the description of the western condition as living in a ‘sea of carcinogens’ (Carson, 1972: 211).

In more recent times, the nature of the toxic sea in which we struggle to stay afloat has changed. This is signalled by a book that ex-Vice Presi- dent Al Gore claims, in its preface, as the successor to Silent Spring. This 1996 book, written by Theo Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski and John Peterson Myers, is entitled Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening our Fertility, Intelligence, and Survival? and is billed as ‘a scientific detective story’.

In a chapter pointedly entitled ‘Beyond cancer’, Colborn et al. criticize the ‘scientific establishment’s focus since Silent Spring on the role of chemicals in producing cancer (Colborn et al., 1996: 203). Hormonally active chemicals, they argue, do not act in the same way as carcinogens

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and are not poisons in the normal sense: ‘Until we recognize this’, they assert, ‘we will be looking in the wrong places [and] asking the wrong questions’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 203).

Our Stolen Future figures hormone-disrupting chemicals as ‘the thugs on the biological information highway that sabotage vital communication’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 203). Playing on the common scientific metaphor of hormones as messengers, EDCs are said to ‘mug the messengers, or impersonate them. They jam signals. They scramble messages. They sow information’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 203). In direct contradiction of Carson, they stress that today, ‘the key concept in thinking about this kind of toxic assault is . . . [n]ot poisons, not carcinogens, but chemical messages’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 204). This focus on the message-disrupt- ing abilities of EDCs shifts attention away from cancer towards sexual reproduction. Colborn et al. argue that, ‘what is at stake [now] is not simply a matter of some individual destinies or impacts on the most sensi- tive amongst us but a widespread erosion of human potential over the past half century’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 232).

Colborn et al.’s argument is emotive, panic producing and powerful. These effects are in part dependent on the mobilization of pervasive cultural understandings of sex differences as antagonistic, and of human and other animal existence as based on sexual reproduction. The mobiliz- ation of these understandings is evident when Colborn et al. evoke the ‘insidious erosion of the human species’ potentiated by EDCs (Colborn et al., 1996: 234). In an insidious move of their own, Colborn et al. suggest that the current ‘breakdown of the family’, including rising rates of child abuse and neglect, and the high rates of attention deficit hyper- activity disorder among children may be caused by EDCs (Colborn et al., 1996: 186, 237). The action of EDCs, indeed, is discussed as an ‘assault on our children’ (Colborn at al., 1996: 238). Colborn et al. thus spice up the threat of EDCs with reference to speculative psychobiology, behavioural psychology and psychoneuroendocrinology of the sort discussed above (specifically LeVay’s work on the biological causes of homosexuality), and by neglecting the role of social forces in human sexuality.

Reliance on such research means that ultimately, despite paying lip service to the importance of social factors in the production of human sexuality (Colborn et al., 1996: 194–5), Colborn et al. state that ‘[w]e are confident that ongoing research will confirm that the hormonal experi- ence of the developing embryo at crucial stages of its development has an impact on adult behaviour in humans, affecting the choice of mates, parenting, social behaviour, and other significant dimensions of humanity’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 238). Such confidence is based on a long history of unjustified speculation.

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The emphasis on the importance of EDCs as a threat to human repro- ductivity is not, however, limited to popular books (for another example, see Cadbury, 1998). Well-known environmentalist groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, 1997, 1998, 1999), Friends of the Earth (Friends of the Earth, 2001d; Riley et al., 1999; Warhurst, 2000) and Greenpeace (Thornton, 1997), have all produced policy statements, reports and, in the case of the UK arm of the WWF, a national awareness- raising campaign on EDCs (World Wildlife Fund, 2002). The WWF has a strong connection to Colborn, who wrote Our Stolen Future (1996) in her capacity as ‘WWF’s senior scientist’ (World Wildlife Fund, 1998). Many WWF publications invoke a similar rhetoric to that used in Our Stolen Future.

WWF’s awareness-raising campaign on EDCs, for example, which was published in UK newspapers, magazines and on the internet in February 2002, aims to provoke a strong response. Utilizing a red-tinted close-up of a human foetus, the full-page advertisement states ‘The womb should be the safest place on earth’ (World Wildlife Fund, 2002). The use of this image is highly problematic. Invoking both anti-abortion politics (in which the use of similar images to evoke the vulnerability of the foetus is commonplace), and a restrictive figuration of mothers as ‘place’ or environment, this image unavoidably (even if unintentionally) ties WWF’s work on EDCs with conservative, anti-feminist campaigns around issues of reproduction.4

In recent years, key governmental and scientific bodies in the US (National Research Council, 1999) and Britain (The Royal Society, 2000), among others, have produced documents summarizing current research and making strong calls for more work in this area (see also Krimsky, 2000). The U.S National Research Council’s recent literature review is 400 pages long (National Research Council, 1999). This scientific litera- ture is, unsurprisingly, less dramatic in its claims about the impact of EDCs on human reproductive capacities – arguing, for example, that declines in sperm count have yet to be finally demonstrated (National Research Council, 1999: 4) and that the biological routes of EDCs’ actions remain under-explicated. The experience of women whose mothers took the potent synthetic estrogen DES (diethylstilbestrol) during pregnancy, however, remains a strong spectre and evokes great concern that the role of EDCs must be further monitored and studied.

Science journalism, however, does buy into the panic-orientation of the more popular books and some environmental campaigns. In a two-part series published in Science News, Janet Raloff (1994a, 1994b) writes that ‘Mother Nature is exerting a feminising hormonal influence’ on both human and non-human animals, and indeed suggests that ‘with the growing ubiquity of pesticides and other pollutants possessing the

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functional attributes of female hormones, our environment effectively bathes us in a sea of estrogens’ (Raloff, 1994b: 56). This panic blurs into a form of homophobic boundary policing in the form of an accompanying cartoon (see Figure 1). In this image, a ‘provocatively dressed’ hormonally affected man is working at the kitchen sink. The loss of masculinity associ- ated with the taking on of feminine tasks is clear to both non-humans and humans. This man is attractive not to ‘man’s best friend’, but to a cat – cause enough for his partner and daughter to become concerned! This cartoon makes clear the connections between sexuality, sexual practice and gender – this biologically affected man is passive (offers himself in a provocative way) and feminized. Raloff ends her series with a question from an endocrinologist: ‘What is the economic cost of having a generation that cannot reproduce?’ (Raloff, 1994b: 58). The type of economy to which she refers is clearly not only monetary, but also a sex/gender/desire economy.

These texts, and the popular ones in particular, argue that the effects of EDCs mean that ‘we’ may no longer be ‘us’. Evoking a kind of sex panic, they suggest that the effects of environmental estrogens on male repro- ductive systems spell the end of humanity because they spell the end of sexual reproduction, and thus of sex. UK science journalist Deborah Cadbury writes for example: ‘Some scientists argue that . . . it will not be long before human reproduction will be under threat’ (Cadbury, 1998: x). Likewise, Colborn et al. gravely state that ‘the danger we face is not simply death and disease. By disrupting hormones and development, these

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Figure 1.

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synthetic chemicals may be changing who we become’ (Colborn et al., 1996: 197).

Feminism on sex and reproduction It might be thought that feminists would welcome the demise of sexual reproduction. The (in)famous work of Shulamith Firestone, dating from 1970, argued that the success of feminism was dependent on the separ- ation of sex and reproduction (Firestone, 1970). Her revolutionary call in this early period of second wave feminism was for women to have access to technology in order that they might be freed from the necessity to reproduce. Critiques of Firestone have been many, however, and it is possible to argue that her focus on reproduction ultimately reproduces, rather than challenges, the connection between sex and sexual reproduc- tion (see for example, Franklin, 1998).

Since Firestone, ever more sophisticated approaches have been developed to pry apart the categories of sex, gender and reproduction. The work of Gayle Rubin (Rubin, 1975, 1992, 1994), and Judith Butler (Butler, 1990, 1993) provide key examples of this. Both theorists have argued that the naturalization of the relations between these categories is intensely prob- lematic for feminism (see Franklin, 2001b; Jackson, 1996). Feminist science studies have also been central to such endeavours – particularly work on the biological and medical sciences, which provides detailed critical readings of those sciences that most obviously connect sex, gender and reproduction. All of this work has shown that connections between sex, gender and reproduction are culturally and historically specific – that, in the succinct words of Judith Butler, ‘there may not be a materiality of sex that is not already burdened by the sex of materiality’ (Butler, 1993: 54).

From the point of view of gay and lesbian, queer and intersex theorists and also activists, the problematization of the sex/reproduction connec- tion provides important avenues through which to challenge the domi- nance of the heterosexual family and heteronormative versions of sexuality more generally. Queer theorist and intersex activist, Morgan Holmes, for example, asserts in her paper ‘Queer Cut Bodies’ (2000), that there are positive connections between endocrinologically-caused infertility and those ‘born’ with intersexed bodies. Discussing the work of feminist theorist Julia Epstein, Holmes writes:

The same etiologies that may produce atypical genitals are also the most common causes of infertility, hence a large number of the general population share the same genetic, chromosomal, or hormonal makeups as those of us who are ‘intersexed’ . . . What would happen if we imagined a world in which we might all be in some way intersexed? Epstein . . . [argues] that ‘sexual ambi- guity threatens the possibility of gender contrariety as the basis for social order

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and thereby threatens the hegemony of heterosexuality’. This is quite a promis- ing kind of troublemaking. (Holmes, 2000: 103)

While the theoretical and political argument being made here is interest- ing, Holmes’ sense of the ‘promise’ of hormonally caused infertility stands in unacknowledged tension with feminist research on infertility. This work, coming from Charis Cussins (1998), Sarah Franklin (1997) and Margarete Sandelowski (1993) among others, demonstrates both the keen suffering of infertile people and their active pursuit of technical assistance. Taking the experiences of infertility more seriously, then, requires a more sophisti- cated response to claims about the end of sexual reproduction than celebration. The question becomes, how can we formulate a theoretical approach to these issues in ways that can take on board the biological, or ‘the materiality of sex’, without contributing to constraining discourses of sex/biology?

Paying ‘careful attention’ to the biological Feminist anthropologist Sarah Franklin’s work on the ‘cloning’ of Dolly the sheep shows that ‘laws of biology’ in relation to sexual reproduction are being challenged – the ‘biologically impossible’ has been achieved (Franklin, 2001a). The existence of Dolly, Franklin argues, has important implications for western understandings of biological kinship. If repro- duction no longer requires two sexually differentiated adults as parents, but rather, can, as in the case of Dolly, be achieved through the introduc- tion of a somatic (mammary gland) cell nucleus into a (de-nucleated) egg cell, our biological notions of reproduction (as the result of the combi- nation of two sex cells) come into question.

Franklin notes that the long feminist and queer struggle to denatural- ize gender, kinship and biological reproduction coincides today with a troubling of the terms of biology both within scientific material–semiotic practices, and within bodies themselves. Such troubling, she argues, is evident precisely through such achievements as the cloning of Dolly. ‘It is,’ she writes:

As if the long struggle to ‘denaturalise’ kinship and gender, by disembedding them from the biological has come to be accompanied by a denaturalisation of biology itself from within, as it were. Not only within biological sciences but also within biological bodies, it has become more difficult to determine what it means to speak in ‘strictly biological’ terms. (Franklin, 2001b: 303)

The production of Dolly the sheep is clearly at the cutting edge of contem- porary science, and the possible application of these methods of somatic cell nuclear transfer to the production of human ‘clones’ remains, despite recent media claims, technically questionable and highly contested

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(Boseley and Campbell, 2001; Kolata and Pollack, 2001). The impact of endocrine disrupters on sexual reproduction, in contrast, is more wide- spread and does not involve direct medical intervention (although it can lead to such intervention as ‘remedy’).

In both cases, non-human animals are strongly at stake, and act as biological indicators for humans in complex ways. Sheep, pigs, alligators and birds are, among others, implicated here. The attention paid both to the possibilities of human cloning and to the effects of EDCs on human reproduction indicate that humans share kinship with animals, but also that this does not mean that we are ‘fixed’ or biologically determined in any simple way (nor indeed, Dolly shows us, are animals) (Franklin, 2001b; Haraway, 1997). On the contrary, both examples show that ‘biology’ is extremely flexible and open to intervention – there are no clear boundaries or limits around its activities. Yet, what these examples also demonstrate is that there are strong biological effects on our bodies and activities. We are not fixed biologically (there are no definite limits or biological laws constraining us), but we are strongly affected at levels that might be called ‘biological’.

Sex, then, could be said to have a ‘biological’ aspect, but this is not one that is fixed or isolatable from other ‘non-biological’ aspects of sex or the body. Although it is not clear anymore, as Franklin argues, what is ‘biological’ and what is not, feminists still need some way of theorizing things like sex hormones, which have ‘biological’ or bodily impacts, and these need to proceed without contributing to a version of sex that makes determinist arguments about biological forces such as hormones. Franklin comments on her work in this regard:

The contention here is neither celebratory nor utopian. I am making a more preliminary argument suggesting that biological facts continue to matter very much to how both ‘kinship’ and ‘gender’ are understood, but that they do so in ways that require careful attention, and are not as self-evident as they might appear. (Franklin, 2001b: 304)

This call to give ‘careful attention’ to the ways in which biological ‘facts’ continue to matter to the production of gender is highly pertinent to the question of EDCs. The discourses on EDCs indicate that norms of sexual reproduction are being challenged and changed. Swimming or drowning in a sea of estrogens may well have important impacts on many forms of human and animal reproductive and other life, but the alarmist rhetoric of Colborn et al. and key environmental organizations constitutes a prob- lematic response to this situation. Consideration of EDCs might be better directed towards Haraway’s key question about OncoMouseTM, mutated from science studies theorist Susan Leigh Star’s ‘Qui bono?’ – that is, ‘who lives and dies – human, nonhuman, and cyborg – and how?’ (Haraway,

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1997: 113). Answers to such questions will only come from ‘careful atten- tion’ to the ways in which the biological continues to matter to sex, sexu- ality and sexual reproduction.

The question ‘who lives and dies?’ also opens up political questions about who benefits from the introduction of EDCs into various environ- ments. Clearly some businesses and individuals benefit from forms of polluting activities linked to EDCs. Interests around EDCs, in other words, concern financial and sexual economies.

Discourses around EDCs show that the ‘materiality of sex’ (to re-quote Butler) increasingly involves the complex effects of chemicals acting like, or with, sex hormones. The materiality of sex today is embodied in the western man producing small quantities of sperm, of the small-penised alli- gator, and the ‘lesbian’ gull. The central argument here, however, is that the ‘burden of the sex of materiality’ is also evident in these contemporary scenarios. Discourses on EDCs are inflected by long histories of thinking around sex hormones, sexuality and sexual reproduction, which them- selves mobilize narrow versions of sex. These discourses participate in the reproduction of particular and problematic versions of human and non- human sex differences and the role of sex hormones in producing these. A feminist approach to EDCs, then, must answer questions about their effects – the ‘who lives and dies?’ question – taking both the sex of materi- ality and the materiality of sex quite seriously.

Notes 1. Fausto-Sterling describes the mid-century work of Frank Beach, which

postulated a more complex model of rat sexual behaviours (and genders) (Fausto-Sterling, 2000: 206–211). The work cited here demonstrates a more conservative model, developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

2. There has been much experimentation and debate around the differences in lateralization between men and women and between homo- and hetero- sexuals, and there is little agreement in the field (Bradshaw and Rogers, 1993; Rogers, 1988, 1999). Prenatal hormones are seen to cause these differences in brain lateralization, which are often measured through tests of handedness. It is argued by McCormick, Witelson and Kingstone, for example, that homosexual women are more likely to be lefthanded and that this indicates an exposure to higher levels of testosterone in utero, but that the fact that more homosexual men are likely to be lefthanded indicates exposure to less testos- terone in utero (thus sexual difference and difference in sexual orientation is combined in their discussion) (McCormick et al., 1990).

3. Recent research by Byne et al. attempts to replicate LeVay’s work, but finds only a sex difference in the interstitial nuclei and no difference in relation to sexual orientation (Byne et al., 2001). Like LeVay’s work, this research makes presumptions about sexual practice and sexual orientation. Male subjects who had died from HIV infection were presumed to be homosexual if homo- sexuality was listed as the only known risk factor for HIV infection on the

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autopsy report. Other male subjects who had intravenous drug use listed as the only risk factor were presumed to be heterosexual. Subjects who died of causes other than HIV-related conditions were presumed to be heterosexual (Byne et al., 2001: 87). All the female subjects were presumed to be hetero- sexual, and no argument is made about brain variation due to sexual orientation in women (Byne et al., 2001: 87). Another recent paper attempts to replicate LeVay’s work in relation to sex differences, leaving aside the question of homosexuality. Byne at al. (2000a) found that one part of the interstitial nuclei of the human anterior hypothalamus studied by LeVay does demonstrate a sex difference. The authors remark, however, that ‘It must be borne in mind . . . that the major expansion of the human brain occurs postnatally while the individual is in constant interaction with the environment, both modifying it and being modified by it,’ and cite the work of Byne and Parsons (1993) in this respect (Byne et al., 2000: 257). Thus their finding of a sex difference in one part of the brain in deceased adults is not necessarily viewed as evidence of a purely biological difference produced in utero.

4. For feminist work on the image of the foetus and its connections to anti- abortion politics, and the representation of mothers as environments, see Duden, 1993, Haraway, 1997, Hartouni, 1997.

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Biographical Note Celia Roberts is a research associate in the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, working on an ethnographic study of the social meanings of genetic information within assisted conception. She is also writing a book on sex hormones, feminism and biological bodies. Address: Dept. of Sociology, Lancaster University, LA1 4YL, UK. [email: [email protected]]

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