hormones | Platypus

(Seed) Cycling Toward a Crossroads: Menstrual Positivity and Hormone Practices Under Right-Wing Regimes

 Anna Wood  February 4, 2026

Over the past several years, menstrual and hormonal cycles have gained significant public attention across the US and Europe, concurrent with growing skepticism towards biomedicine and an idealization of the natural. From widespread rejection of hormonal contraceptives in favor cycle-based fertility tracking, to satirical social media trends around hormonal cycles, discourses around menstruation reflect a broader zeitgeist around naturopathic wellness. A constellation of women’s health advocates, right-wing influencers, and lay experts have helped to proliferate negative information around hormonal contraceptives, including testimonials about side effects and doubts about their safety. This has unfolded alongside a renewed embrace of non-pharmaceutically suppressed menstruation. (read more...)

“Un-fixing” hormones: searching for the multiple in hormonal selves

 Lisa Raeder  October 6, 2020

What are hormones? While biomedical notions of hormones focus on their biological functions in bodies, hormones are also cultural artifacts, shaping understandings of health, normalcy, and what it means to live “hormonally balanced lives.” These molecules activate processes across emotions and physiology, social and material worlds, mental and physical health, organic and synthetic biology, the gendered and the non-gendered, and the normal and the pathological. Thus, hormones carry multiple, sometimes conflicting meanings, and sit at the meeting point between many different biomedical and social spheres of life, making them subject to multiple kinds of knowledges (Roberts, 2007). (read more...)