Cover -- Half-title -- Series-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Figures -- A message to readers -- Acknowledgements -- Introduction: feminism, bodies and biological sex -- Feminist theories of embodiment -- Science studies and the active body -- Foucault's histories of bodies -- Messaging sex -- Organisation of the book -- Part I Hormone histories -- 1 Folding hormonal histories of sex -- Histories of sexual differences -- Internal secretions and internal environments -- Organotherapy -- Internal secretions and sex -- 'Discovering' sex hormones -- Understanding change: between 'science' and 'culture' -- The science studies approach: Latour, Oudshoorn and Haraway -- Time and embodiment in hormone histories -- Part II Hormonal bodies -- 2 Articulating endocrinology's body -- Theorising technoscientific knowledge production -- Contemporary physiology's hormonal body -- What are hormones and how do they affect the body? -- Hormones and the development of sexual differences -- The foetus and the infant -- Puberty -- Articulating the hormonal body -- Messaging and articulation -- 3 Activating sexed behaviours -- Hormones and 'the organ of behaviour' -- Scientific challenges to the biological/social distinction: animal studies -- Feminist challenges to the biological/social distinction: the lived body -- Popular science -- A feminist response: rejecting essentialism? -- Narrating hormones and sex: two illustrative examples -- Messaging as multidirectional flow -- Part III Hormone cultures -- 4 Elixirs of sex: hormone-replacement therapies and contemporary life -- Menopause for women and men -- HRT histories -- Scientific theories of sexual and racial differences -- Sex hormones and women's 'natural' pathologies -- The menopause as unnatural difference -- Racial differences and the politics of reproduction.

HRT for men: a new model of sexual difference? -- Elixirs of difference -- 5 The messaging effects of HRT -- Intended effects and 'side' effects -- Feminist responses to HRT -- Individual women's decisions: making medical choices -- HRT-taking women and bio-social embodiment -- Bio-social messaging -- 6 Hormones in the world -- Describing 'gender-bending' chemicals -- Exposure to 'abnormal' levels of hormones: technoscientific histories -- Environmental histories: toxic chemicals, nature and sex -- Contemporary discourses of endocrine disruption: mobilising hormone histories -- Feminism and the politics of endocrine disruption -- Global messaging -- Sharing space with polar bears -- Conclusion: hormones as provocation -- Feminism and vital material bodies -- References -- Index.