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Short abstract

Hormones sustain life through physiological-ecological networks equally open to endocrine-disrupting chemicals. This work develops hormonal infrastructure to reframe vital/toxic ambiguity across scales that dominant safety assessments systematically fail to reach.

Long abstract

Sperm counts and biodiversity are vitality indicators that chemical safety assessments struggle to read. Epistemic regimes focused on singularized substances with demonstrable risk fail to account for toxicities that unfold through cumulative, low-dose, and mixture exposures. I identify this mismatch as molecular myopia: not an absence of risk awareness, but an inability to connect emerging risk knowledge across scales through which chemical harm creeps.

To reframe what molecular myopia obscures, this paper develops the concept of hormonal infrastructure – the sensitive physiological-ecological networks that underlie reproduction, development, and metabolism across interconnected bodies, species, and environments. These infrastructures deliver vital hormonal services via molecular pathways that are equally open to exogenous disruptors such as EDCs. The boundary between vitality and toxicity appears only with increasing scales of biological organization, instrumentation, and time.

Using urban wastewater treatment as an empirical context, I trace how hormonal infrastructure is materially shaped through everyday chemical use, technoscientific practice, and natural processes. My aim is to rethink man-made chemicals as part of more-than-human infrastructures that reconfigure through wastewater systems – e.g. once vital pharmaceuticals turning toxic – thus exceeding the logic of laboratory-defined safety. In the face of proliferating chemical production, this paper reorients vigilance from molecules-to-body towards volumes-to-ecosystem to open conceptual space for more resilient futures.