'For men arousal is orientation': Bodily truthing, technosexual scripts, and the materialization of sexualities through the phallometric test

Sex reconfigured: DIY hormone therapy and vernacular endocrinology in transfeminine communities in China

Faced with a restrictive institutional medical landscape, trans people in China turn to DIY (Do-It-Yourself) hormone therapy. While existing health literature has studied the risks and impacts of informal hormone therapy, little is known about the practical strategies and the embedded meaning-making processes around hormone-taking on the ground. Building on digital and in-person participant observation conducted in two cities in China and semi-structured interviews with eight transfeminine individuals between 2021 and 2022, this article examines the embodied practices and community knowledge of tinkering with hormones. Specifically, I examine the ways that conventional biomedical notions of efficacy and risk are both enrolled and contested to understand bodily becoming in the community space. Closely engaging with biomedical structures, ideas, and knowledge, trans people challenge and reformulate dominant notions of efficacy, risk, and toxicity. A form of DIY hormone literacy is taking shape in the community, informed by the hands-on engagement with medicine, an affinity with pharmaceuticals, and people's temporal narratives of transition. Throughout these processes, DIY practitioners multiply the materials and imaginations of medicine. They reshape the narrowly-defined biomedical model of sex and enable an alternative onto-epistemology of hormonal sex-gender that is amenable to modification and constantly in flux. Drawing from medical anthropology, science and technology studies (STS), and feminist, queer, and trans studies, this article contributes to the conversation on the politics and poetics of sex-gender and embodied knowledge production in the community space.

'We Won't Ban Castrating Pervs Despite What Europe Might Think!': Czech Medical Sexology and the Practice of Therapeutic Castration

The Czech Republic holds one of the highest numbers of men labelled as sexual delinquents worldwide who have undergone the irreversible process of surgical castration - a policy that has elicited strong international criticism. Nevertheless, Czech sexology has not changed its attitude towards 'therapeutic castration', which remains widely accepted and practised. In this paper, we analyse the negotiation of expertise supporting castration and demonstrate how the changes in institutional matrices and networks of experts (Eyal 2013) have impacted the categorisation of patients and the methods of treatment. Our research shows the great importance of historical development that tied Czech sexology with the state. Indeed, Czech sexology has been profoundly institutionalised since the early 1970s. In accordance with the state politics of that era, officially named Normalisation, sexology focused on sexual deviants and began creating a treatment programme that included therapeutic castration. This practice, the aim of which is to protect society from sex offenders, has changed little since. We argue that it is the expert-state alliance that enables Czech sexologists to preserve the status quo in the treatment of sexual delinquents despite international pressure. Our research underscores the continuity in medical practice despite the regime change in 1989. With regard to previous scholarship on state-socialist Czechoslovakia, we argue that it was the medical mainstream that developed and sustained disciplining and punitive features.

Engaging the Community: Building Effective Partnerships in Sexual Violence Prevention

Sexual violence is a multifaceted problem with individual, interpersonal, institutional, and cultural dimensions. Researchers have increasingly turned to social institutions, such as nonprofit agencies, in their efforts to understand and ultimately prevent aggression and victimization. Drawing on interviews with 30 scientists and other scholars, this study explored sexual violence researchers’ experiences with and approaches to collaborating with local communities and institutions. Participants shared diverse experiences working with institutionalized and noninstitutionalized local communities, antiviolence advocates and social workers, medical providers, police, attorneys, employees of bars and restaurants, educators, and university administrators. Many noted that the commitments that motivate researchers may be insufficient for engaging community partners. The aim of ending violence, in itself, may not be enough. Narratives of trauma, of risk and safety, may not be enough. Concerns about limited resources and potential backlash or liability may dissuade community members and institutions from partnering with researchers in prevention. Distrust may also pose a barrier. Fortunately, researchers have developed promising strategies for engaging institutional partners despite these concerns. These include cultivating mutual partnerships, in which researchers prioritize institutional input and commit to giving back to their partners and surrounding communities; combining awareness and prevention, in which efforts to raise awareness through institutions are coupled with the development of concrete action plans; and reframing the problem, in which sexual violence or its outcomes are connected with established institutional priorities.

Egalitarian: From Homophile to Helicophile in Post-World War II America

The presidency of gender in the Anglo-American taxonomy of sexualities historically has been haunted by the irruption of "other" parameters of medicalization, censure, and caesura, not in the least absolute and relative measures of age. Where today's clinical psychologists feel the need to age-specify adult homosexuality in such Hirschfeldian terms as androphilia, however, the felt need is indeed still essentially clinical. That cosmopolitan expressions such as homosexual, LGB, or queer rarely require such specifications relies on a protracted and today, arguably, complete disarticulation of sex/gender and age/maturity as parameters of sexual orientation, accreditation, and mobilization. Notably disconnected discursive frames gave voice to this Anglophone crystallization of "the normal homosexual" (circa 1950-1980): criminological, psychiatric, psychophysiological, and psychodynamic typologies of "sexual deviation" (variably tending to correlate, align, or subsume same-sex and age-disparate intimacies); territorializing apologias of gay, but also of "Greek," "pederast," and "man-boy," socialities; anthropological-historical exotification of "age-stratified homosexualities"; and mostly European, proto-queer critiques of all "bourgeois" sexual classification.