Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

DIY hormone practices form a feminist biotechnical frontier, where bodies, knowledge and care are commoned. Ethnography shows tensions between autonomy and collective sympoiesis, revealing insurgent forms of technoscience crafted at the margins.

Paper long abstract

Hormonal pharmaceuticals constitute a peculiar biotechnical frontier: at once molecular, reproductive and gendered. While hormone synthesis has existed since the early 20th century, feminising hormones remain marginal within biomedical research, circulating through off-label uses of drugs developed for cis women’s bodies. This marginal position pushes trans communities to assemble DIY hormone practices combining scientific knowledge, embodied expertise and informal pharmaceutical circuits.

Based on a six-month ethnography of DIY hormone self-injection workshops in Switzerland, this paper conceptualises these practices as modes of commoning at the biotechnical frontier. Workshops enact a sympoiesis between bodies, molecules, protocols, care relations, online knowledge and risk management; they redistribute healthcare labour and rework the expert/non-expert divide. Reconnected to the historical techno-feminist project of autogynecology, these practices extend a tradition of self-help biotechnologies reclaiming clinical knowledge from patriarchal medicine.

Crucially, the paper foregrounds the tensions between sympoiesis/commoning and autonomy/self-help. How do collective modes of making-with reshape the feminist promise of autonomy? When does commoning enable experimentation, and when does it devolve responsibility and risk onto individuals? Who decides where cooperation ends and self-management begins? And how are conflicting imaginaries of safety, legitimacy and futurity negotiated at the frontier ?

By bridging feminist technoscience histories with trans DIY pharmaceutical practices, the paper argues that socio-technical frontiers are not only industrial or speculative, but also embodied, insurgent and commons-based – crafted in the margins as much as in the laboratory, and negotiated through ambivalent feminist commons where survival, speculation and responsibility are collectively at stake.