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.

Contact
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
Back to overview
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
name contradiction

“Contradiction becomes real where someone names contradiction.”

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“Contradiction comes in many different forms. None is so debilitating than when the coloniser transitions, textually not politically, to decoloniality without taking the responsibility for the afterlife of colonialism, which they continue to benefit from. Self-examination and self-interrogation of the relations of coloniality, a necessity, seem nearly impossible for the coloniser who continues to act as beneficiary, masked in the new-found language of White fragility, devoid of an ethical responsibility of the very system of White domination they claim to be against.” (Black Consciousness and the Politics of the Flesh)

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“If you think that acts of contradicting someone always need to point to better solutions, you haven’t really understood the idea of democratic critique.”

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