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Paper short abstract

The paper examines biosocial collaborations amid returning quests for ‘hardened’ biological knowledge on gender/sex. Drawing on ethnography, it traces the molecularization of gender/sex and demonstrates the ambivalences and contestations of gender/sex knowledge between the bio and the social.

Paper long abstract

Against the backdrop of the re-emergence of ‘hardened’ biological knowledge about gender/sex this contribution explores the ambivalent ‘colonialization’ of the social through biology. For this I analyze ethnographic observation protocols and interviews from an interdisciplinary collaboration on gender/sex between bio and social sciences.

Through this analysis, firstly, a progressive ‘molecularization’ (Rose 2011, Peters 2021) of gender/sex can be observed in biomedicine: gender/sex is increasingly referred to genetic, hormonal, and cellular markers in order to define it precisely, operationalize it, and clinically contain it. At the same time, the integration of the gender category expands the scope of responsibility of biomedical research. Paradoxically, however, in this it remains dependent on expertise from the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies, as central conceptual, epistemic, and political debates about gender/sex are embedded in these disciplines.

Secondly, this expansion onto gender/sex in bio-medicine is fraught with ambivalence: disciplinary divisions of knowledge (practices) along the lines of sex vs. gender are enacted as well as contradicted; they function momentarily as re-essentializations of a ‘biological sex’ and then again as deconstructions of the gender/sex binary.

With this the contribution examines practices of a bio-social collaboration on gender/sex within the context of current – including reactionary – shifts in the ‘biological age’. Rather than observing a convergence of biosocial considerations into reactionary politics, I trace a conflictual terrain between ‘hardened’ binary gender/sex conceptualizations and their reconfigurations along notions of diversity and processuality – a terrain on which the contemporary politics of biology are actively negotiated and reconfigured.