Messengers of Sex: Hormones, Biomedicine and Feminism (Cambridge Studies in Society and the Life Sciences) - Hardcover

Roberts, Celia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0521863376 ISBN 13: 9780521863377

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2007

Synopsis

Since the early twentieth century, hormones have commonly been understood as 'messengers of sex'. They are seen as essential to the development and functioning of healthy reproductive male and female bodies; millions take them as medications in the treatment of fertility, infertility and ageing. However, in contemporary society, hormones are both disturbed and disturbing; invading our environments and bodies through plastics, food and water, environmental estrogens and other chemicals, threatening irreversible, inter-generational bodily change. Using a wide range of sources, from physiology textbooks to popular parenting books and pharmaceutical advertisements, Celia Roberts analyses the multiple ways in which sex hormones have come to matter to us today. Bringing feminist theories of the body into dialogue with science and technology studies, she develops tools to address one of the most important questions facing feminism today: how is biological sex conceivable?

About this title

Book Description:

Celia Roberts develops new tools to analyse multiple ways in which hormones have come to matter to us in contemporary society. She addresses one of the most important questions facing feminism today: how is biological sex conceived? This book combines feminist theories of the body with science and technology studies.

About the Author:

Celia Roberts is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University. She is the author of Born and Made: An Ethnography of Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis (with Sarah Franklin, 2006).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0521863376
• ISBN 13: 9780521863377
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248