Portraitfoto Helen Stephan

Helen J. Stephan

Material-Discursive Apparatuses and Hormonal Bodies. Living in Contradiction with Binary Gendered Biopolitics

The medical body has acquired the status of a universal category, and hormones configure in a fundamental way the bio-medical understanding of the human as well as the binary construction of gender difference that was institutionalized 120 years ago. My project aims at a praxeological ethnography of apparatuses that produce knowledge of hormonal bodies and are situated in various forms of assemblage (techno-scientific, political, medical, economical), that regulate the accessibility of gendered and racialized human groups to sexual hormones. In my work I will juxtapose the different onto-epistemological figurations of the hormonal-gendered body that are produced by material-discursive apparatuses with the everyday experiences of persons who are pursuing or are looking for the possibility to pursue therapies with hormone replacement therapy in the context of gender transition.

Research Interests
  • Decolonial and Black Theory
  • Queerstudies and Queerfeminism
  • Postcolonial and Feminist Science and Technology Studies
  • New Materialism and Political Economy
  • Psychoanalysis
  • Critical Theory
Vita
  • 2021
    Yisares Autumn School Extractivist Capitalism
  • 2021
    M. A. Transcultural studies at University of Bremen
  • 2017 – 2018
    Project coordination ‘Global Cotton’ at University of Bremen
  • 2016
    B. A. Anthropology and Sociology at University of Hamburg
Talks, Workshops and Events
  • 07.12.2023
    Workshop Agencies, Contradictions, and Subjectivities – Towards a Material-Discursive Framing of Engaged Practices with Brent Abrahams, Dean Stephanus and Vuyisanani Am, University of Bremen
  • 28.09.2023
    Lecture Unsicherheit im Herzen der Herstellungspraxen naturalisierter Ordnungen – Race und trans* als fundierende Kategorien in der Sexualhormonforschung at the panel Verunsicherung einer ‘natürlichen’ Ordnung. (Queer-)feministische Un/Gewissheiten, Congress Political Theory in Times of Uncertainty, University of Bremen
  • 08.06.2023
    Lecture Material-Discursive Apparatusses and Hormonal Bodies. Living in Contradiction to Gender-Binary Biopolitics, University of Bremen
Bhabha on enlightenment and coloniality

“Homi Bhabha says about the contradiction between the ideals of the enlightenment, claims to democracy and solidarity and simultaneous colonization and ongoing coloniality: ‘That ideological tension, visible in the history of the West as a despotic power, at the very moment of the birth of democracy and modernity, has not been adequately written in a contradictory and contrapuntal discourse of tradition.’”

Kerstin Knopf
articulate

“Contradictions need to be articulated in order to exist.”

Martin Nonhoff
power and resistance

“Michel Foucault says: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and […] this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power” (History of Sexuality I, The Will to Knowledge, 1976, p. 95)”

Gisela Febel
city

“The city is a laboratory not only of modernity, but also of contradiction.”

Julia Lossau
limits

“Resistance is a democratic right, sometimes a duty. With literature we can find models for this right and think about its limits.”

Gisela Febel