Sexing hormones and materializing gender in Brazil

Pharmaceutical sex hormones are hybrid, complex objects, which cut across political and sexual economies and are located at the boundary between sex and gender. In pharmaceutical form, they confer sexual characteristics on the body, in part exogenously. It follows that their clinical use is socially regulated according to the dominant norms of gender. Through an ethnographic analysis of the various contexts of hormone use observed in Bahia, Brazil, this article shows that sexual dualism is the product of biomedical practices which regulate the circulation of hormones. The meaning of the locally adopted term “hormônio” is not fully captured by that of “hormones”. The use made in Brazil of the singular term “hormônio” confers upon it a fluid and homogenous quality. In the Brazilian context, hormones are understood as a kind of substance that can circulate between bodies. This conceptualisation of hormones as a substance has implications for the ontological status of the body and reveals the relative plasticity of the sex/gender relation