So Hormonal: Estrogenic Bodies in the United States

Chloe Bell-Wilson
History
UC Los Angeles

Since the mid-twentieth century, pharmaceutical estrogens have structured how American medicine has conceptualized, treated, and governed feminine bodies. While existing scholarship has investigated this multitude of drugs one pill or one use at a time, this dissertation offers a synthetic history of synthetic estrogen as a traveling medical object—one that moved across clinical, regulatory, and cultural domains as contraceptive, fertility treatment, gender-affirming therapy, cancer drug, and, sometimes, carcinogen. Drawing on archival research in clinical and research institutions, regulatory agencies, pharmaceutical firms, and patient advocacy organizations, the project traces how clinicians, regulators, and users navigated the shifting promises and uncertainties of hormonal intervention. Situated at the intersection of the history of medicine and pharmacy, feminist theory, and science and technology studies, this project argues that synthetic estrogens helped produce a form of molecular femininity, in which bodies and identities were increasingly understood—and governed—at the biochemical level. By analyzing medicines themselves as sites of ethical and political decision-making, this project intervenes in medical humanities debates about embodiment, risk, and responsibility, showing how modern medicine’s turn toward biochemical management reconfigured both gender and the boundaries between treatment, prevention, and harm.