From 2011 to 2023, I carried out artistic research on body data, inncluding about hormones, including using paper and code sketches.
Excerpt from an interview about my 2022+ hormones research is part of the upcoming Market Cafe Magazine Issue #9 on Invisible Data.
Q: Medical institutions often privilege certain bodies and hormonal experiences over others. How do you see your work counteracting the structural absence of diverse hormonal narratives?
There’s a double exclusion that happens. First, some experiences may be systematically dismissed. One common example of that would be women with chronic illness, who may not be believed in health care and research contexts. And then on top of that, sometimes knowledge does exist, and then is not easily available, or outright destroyed! Quite a bit of historical medical knowledge on transgender care has only recently been organised and archived. We also cannot forget that the first nazi book burnings in 1933 Germany targeted research on sexual identity. So when we talk about empowerment through data solidarity and through collective research, I think it’s important to have an intuition for history. If we are creating datasets or visualizations because they are missing, how is our approach informed by the reason for that absence in the first place? (To be systematized is a form of vulnerability.) Can collective sense-making address data’s capacity for misuse? It’s complicated, the body is complicated, the history of body knowledge is complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to build understanding, but it means getting comfortable with uncertainty. That’s what I hope to do through texts or visuals or performance: practice holding uncertainty and complexity, and working together to build knowledge anyway.
If medical history had been more inclusive and data had been collected differently, how do you think our collective understanding of hormones—and bodily autonomy—would look today?
Imagine: a much earlier integration of quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis methods. Quantitative rigor is important to building reliable knowledge, but it can be too easily misused for political ends. Francis Galton, an important figure in statistical methods development, also coined the term “eugenics.” Statistical methods were later used within the racial policies of fascist regimes to support extreme, violent control. What if quantitative methods never had their political potency? At its best, quantitative research offers validity and generalisability, but it risks ignoring lived experience. Qualitative methods, while not generalisable, can guide what to study and root science in human experience. Hormones are complex to isolate, and we might already know more if qualitative approaches had been embraced earlier, even before recent technological advances. Such methods could also engage people directly in co-creating body knowledge, including through self-experimentation.