Mobile Desires

The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice

Liz Montegary, Melissa Autumn White, Liz Montegary, Melissa Autumn White

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137464217
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book combines mobilities research with feminist and queer studies offering new perspectives on mobility justice. It foregrounds academic, activist, and artistic work revealing state-sponsored strategies for managing the mobility of people as mechanisms for aligning erotic and political desires with capitalist and nationalist interests.

Part I

Securing Spaces, Im/mobilizing Desires

1

Moving Violations: Synthetic Hormones, Sexual Deviance, and Gendered Mobilities

Toby Beauchamp

Abstract: Focusing on mobilities at the micro-level, Beauchamp examines US state efforts to control improperly desiring bodies by using synthetic hormones to interrupt their bodily movements. The essay draws on transgender studies to analyze the public discourse surrounding the incorporation of chemical castration into the US penal code, foregrounding efforts to stabilize and contain unruly bodies through hormonal treatments. While chemical castration may seem to immobilize criminalized bodies in ways that exceed the material confines of the prison itself, this opening chapter argues that such hormonal practices actually move bodies in new ways, creating shifts in gender and sexuality that confound state efforts to stabilize these categories.

Keywords: chemical castration; criminalization; hormones; prison; sexuality; transgender

Montegary, Liz and Melissa Autumn White, eds. Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. DOI: 10.1057/9781137464217.0008.

In 1996, as California prepared to become the first US state to add chemical castration to its penal code, news media highlighted public debates about the practice. A New York Times article included comments from Fred Berlin, founding researcher at the Sexual Disorders Clinic at Johns Hopkins University who, along with his colleague John Money, is regularly cited as a medical expert on hormonal treatment for those classified as sexual offenders. In the interview, Berlin claims that there is ‘no easy answer” to the debate: ‘It’s not enough just to say “Let’s lock ‘em up and castrate the bastards,” however horrible their misdeeds. Some people you just lock up. Some people you lock up and treat. Some people you treat. It’s complicated’ (Ayres, 1996).

As a punitive response to sexual offenses, chemical castration uses anti-androgen drugs to significantly counteract the body’s production of testosterone, in turn suppressing one’s desire and ability to engage in certain criminalized sex acts. Although Berlin’s statement implies a distinction between such hormonal practices and simply being ‘locked up,’ this essay considers, in part, the continuities between such state actions. In what ways might we understand these hormonal treatments as moving the prison’s restrictive properties into the very cells of the criminalized body? In different registers, Jenna Loyd and Vernadette Gonzalez’s essays in this volume each assess the ways that an idealized mobility for some populations rests on the systematic constraint of marginalized others. Here, I follow this constraint in a different direction: into the body itself. In his discussion of modern conceptions of mobility, Tim Cresswell points to early scientific and philosophical studies of blood and other bodily fluids as the foundation for liberal associations between freedom and bodily movements. Assessing Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy of liberty, for instance, Cresswell notes that ‘life itself, Hobbes believed, was located in the movement of blood and the movement of the limbs,’ making the liberal ideal of unrestrained mobility – even at the level of one’s own bodily functions – fundamental to modern notions of freedom and citizenship (2006, p. 14).

This essay takes seriously the question of mobility at the micro-level, investigating US state efforts to control improperly desiring bodies by using synthetic sex hormones to interrupt their bodily movements. Rather than arguing for or against these practices per se, I am interested in the complicated ways that gender and sexuality appear both fixed and fluid as the state attempts to chemically redirect certain criminalized bodies toward an innocuous sexual status by intervening in their hormonal flows. With this in mind, the essay proceeds in three parts. First, I offer a brief overview of early endocrinology studies underlying current chemical castration policies, focusing especially on the ways that transgender-specific hormonal treatments reveal gender categories to be simultaneously fixed and fluid. In the second section, I analyze chemical castration policies and practices as supplements to prison sentences that restrain bodies even outside of the prison structure, demonstrating their investment in stabilizing and containing unruly bodies. Finally, I reread this apparent immobilization through the critical lens of transgender studies to argue that while chemical castration policies may seem to immobilize criminalized bodies, they actually move these bodies in new ways, unintentionally creating shifts in gender and sexuality that confound state efforts to stabilize these categories.

Treating instability

Although chemical castration formally became a component of US criminal law only recently, the use of synthetic hormones to correct bodies classified as sexually deviant has a much longer history in the United States. Sex hormones constituted a primary method by which doctors and researchers sought to diagnose and correct unruly gender and sexuality: as early as the 1930s, endocrinologists began measuring ratios of estrogens and androgens in individual bodies, prescribing synthetic hormones as a treatment for hormone levels found to be abnormal. Efforts to construct proper femininity and masculinity (marked as such in part through their adherence to heteronormative behaviors) both drew on and reinforced scientific mappings of racial and national hierarchies. Sexually deviant bodies were often characterized as having under- or over-developed endocrine and reproductive systems associated with more primitive physiologies (Terry, 1995). In this way, testosterone deficiencies could mark some racialized male-assigned bodies as inferior to white masculinity; at the same time, an excess of testosterone said to characterize other racial categories could position them as innately violent and aggressively sexual.

Jennifer Terry explains that mid-20th century efforts to physiologically distinguish between homosexual and heterosexual bodies – using hormone ratios as well as various other bodily measurements – temporarily broke down in the face of Alfred Kinsey’s research showing a marked fluidity between sexual categories that had previously been understood as mutually exclusive. Hormones are a particularly clear example of the ways that classifications of sex and gender continually shift: because all bodies produce both androgens and estrogens in amounts that vary constantly across the body’s lifespan, sex hormones refute the notion that proper gender and sexuality can be objectively assessed as a fixed and definitive measurement. Thus, Terry notes that Kinsey’s work is both significant and threatening because ‘it made the border between homosexuality and heterosexuality permeable and highly contingent’ (1995, p. 159). In response to this threat, researchers renewed their efforts to locate deviant gender and sexuality in the body, focusing largely on endocrinology and hormones’ relationship to neurochemistry.

These attempts to hormonally eradicate homosexuality importantly prefigure current chemical castration practices. Henry Rubin notes that by 1947, ‘physicians decided that male inverts could not be “cured” of their homosexual inversion, but they could be rendered sexually inactive. Libido reduction, through estrogen treatments, was the next best thing to a true change of sexual object choice’ (Rubin, 2006, p. 491). Clinical psychologist John Money, working out of his Johns Hopkins clinic, began testing anti-androgens as treatment for a variety of sexual and gender disorders in the 1960s. As Daniel Tsang explains, Money ‘zealously promoted the use of Depo-Provera in the treatment of paraphilias (his neologism for sexual perversions), among which he includes pedophilia, ephebophilia, cross dressing, voyeurism, and sado-masochism’ (1995, p. 407). Money was also well-known for his studies and proposed treatments of transgender and transsexual people, and, along with many of his contemporaries, by the 1960s he supported the theory that hormones deeply influenced gender and sexual identity, desires, and behaviors (Meyerowitz, 2002, p. 117).

Thus, in addition to their role in scientifically defining sexual and gendered categories, hormones also became a basic form of medical treatment for bodies that transgressed the boundaries of those categories, and the development of synthetic hormone treatments for homosexuality influenced later efforts to hormonally realign people diagnosed as transgender. Drawing on theories that hormones contributed to gender and sexual identities, physician Harry Benjamin’s 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon argued that many elements of human physiology, including hormones, were ‘never entirely male or female,’ and could be influenced to shift gender in one direction or the other (1966, p. 8). Benjamin’s work produced the first formal set of standards of care for medical professionals studying and treating transgender people. This 1979 document, titled ‘Standards of Care: The Hormonal and Surgical Sex Reassignment of Gender Dysphoric Persons’, specifically marks synthetic hormones as ‘therapeutic’ (p. 4) and ‘rehabilitative’ (p. 7) for those diagnosed with gender dysphoria, because these drugs produce ‘somatic changes in order for the patient to more closely approximate the physical appearance of the genotypically other sex’ (p. 2). Yet the document also cautions that ‘hormonal sex-reassignment may have some irreversible effects’ in both male- and female-assigned patients. In this way, medical standards for hormone use in transgender contexts suggested that synthetic hormones were simultaneously capable of rerouting gender and of newly fixing it in place.

These twin actions attributed to hormones – the concurrent shifting and restabilizing of gender – also more broadly characterize the US state’s relationship with people categorized as transgender. For instance, the state acknowledges a certain flexibility of gender by creating processes through which gender markers might be revised or amended, but this flexibility is reincorporated as stability inasmuch as an individual must then firmly settle on the other gender category, made legible through ‘irreversible’ medical and legal procedures. This legibility itself depends upon the unmarked racial and sexual hierarchies through which medico-legal standards frame normative masculinity and femininity; diagnosis and treatment of gender dysphoria incorporates those racialized and sexualized interpretations of hormone levels that informed early endocrinological studies. Hormone treatments intended to be corrective, then, may be meted out differently as medical practitioners interpret some racialized bodies as transgender and others as innately sexually threatening.

Just as Benjamin’s standards of care describe synthetic hormones as rehabilitative, these medico-legal processes ostensibly work to normalize and stabilize unruly genders. Yet in doing so, they also produce bodies and identities that exceed and confound the state’s seemingly well-bounded gender classifications. Thus, although often considered a corrective treatment meant to realign deviant bodies in the interest of public health, synthetic hormones also open new forms of gendered mobility that throw categories of gender and sexuality into disarray. These complicated practices can offer insight into related state strategies to restrict bodily movements deemed abnormal and unnatural.

Chemical containment

Synthetic sex hormones figure in the systematic containment of myriad unruly bodies. For example, to inhibit sexual desire and function in male-assigned bodies convicted of certain sexual offenses, chemical castration is conducted via synthetic progestin hormones (those related to menstruation and pregnancy), typically in the form of Depo-Provera. This drug is perhaps more well-known for its prominent use in long-term birth control and sterilization programs leveraged by the US state against female-assigned bodies, particularly along lines of race, class, and disability.¹ Like the above framings of hormonal treatments as therapeutic, targeted birth control programs also appeared in the guise of rehabilitation, as when state health officials cited ‘hygienic reasons’ for coercive Depo-Provera doses for Native women and women with disabilities (Smith, 2005, p. 92). Such programs can work in conjunction with the prison, when bodies are already architecturally constrained, but they also carry the logic of the prison into the body itself, effectively immobilizing certain populations by steadily reducing sexual and reproductive capacities. Although the state deems chemical castration an ineffective deterrent for female-assigned bodies convicted of sexual offenses, this does not mean the practice is therefore disconnected from such bodies. Rather, it illuminates how the meanings attached to sex hormones and deviance differ in relation to hierarchies of gender, race, class, and disability and how these differences produce a range of intertwined mechanisms of control and containment.

With this context in mind, chemical castration emerges as part of a larger pattern of bodily control through disruption of hormonal flows, and its relationship to formal incarceration crystalizes. The practice first appeared in US penal code in 1996, when California adopted it as a mandatory condition of parole for people convicted more than once of sexual offenses against persons younger than 13 and as a voluntary option for parole for first-time sexual offense convictions. Since that time, seven additional states have added chemical castration laws, with two (Georgia and Oregon) subsequently repealing them.² Each is a slight variation on a common theme: chemical castration serves as an alternative to surgical castration as punishment for a range of sexual offenses. The Department of Corrections (DOC) oversees medical and/or psychological testing and the administration of synthetic hormones for people convicted of specific sexual offenses. Typically, as seen in Iowa, the process begins prior to parole and continues until the state ‘determines that the treatment is no longer necessary’ (Iowa, 2013).

These policies and practices operate rhetorically as a form of immobilization, appearing to keep criminalized bodies strategically contained. In fact, this use of anti-androgens proved compelling enough to warrant consideration in a 1988 US Congressional hearing on the place of various new technologies in criminal justice efforts. In addition to a lengthy discussion of synthetic hormones specifically for sexual offenders, the committee also addressed the possibility of their use for prison populations overall: ‘since research has demonstrated that Depo-Provera also reduces aggression, some prison administrators might attempt to use the drug on all inmates in an effort to control violence and homosexual activity. In fact, at least one criminal justice official has advocated such use’ (US Congress, 1988, p. 43). Although this suggestion is met with some apprehension – the committee notes that blanket use of anti-androgens could constitute cruel and unusual punishment – its inclusion here marks the extent to which synthetic hormones might be used alongside literal incarceration to restrain bodies at a different level.

The text of the laws themselves often creates a discursive equivalence between the containment imposed by the walls of the prison and that induced by synthetic hormones. For instance, the Wisconsin statute specifies that the parole board may deny parole based on ‘refusal by the inmate to participate in counseling or treatment’ deemed necessary by the state, ‘including pharmacological treatment using an antiandrogen or the chemical equivalent’ (Wisconsin, 2013). Similarly, Montana’s legal code notes that ‘failure to continue treatment as ordered by the department of corrections constitutes a criminal contempt of court for failure to comply with the sentence,’ a transgression that results in re-incarceration without possibility of parole (Montana, 2013). By making chemical castration a necessary component of parole, the law presents it as an alternative to the material confines of the prison, but an alternative that is no less a form of incarceration. Because refusing anti-androgens entails more time in prison, these hormone policies appear as a replacement for literal imprisonment, containing the body in a different but seemingly equivalent way.

We might also understand chemical castration policies as an extension of incarceration: because they typically function as a required supplement to and condition of parole, these hormonal regimens not only intensify the parole system but also incarcerate from within the body itself, even when that body is beyond the prison walls. A more generous reading might consider how such practices function as a transition period between incarceration and release: several states specify that administration of hormones should begin prior to parole, and should continue until state actors deem they are no longer necessary. Even in this context, though, chemical castration appears as an extra assurance that the state continues to restrain particular bodies, suggesting that prison walls are not the only way – perhaps not even the most effective way – for the state to restrict bodily mobility.

This assurance lies in part in the intended effects of chemical castration: the rationale behind such hormone dosages is that they return the (male-assigned) body to a pre-pubescent status, in which the offending body parts literally fail to move in certain ways. Attorney Christopher Meisenkothen characterizes the individuals falling under these statutes as ‘paraphiliacs, or those possessed of uncontrollable biological urges in the form of sexual fantasies that can usually only be satisfied by acting on the fantasy and succumbing to the compulsion’ (1999, p. 140). His description is emblematic of a broader understanding of certain sexual desires and actions as fundamentally driven by biological or chemical abnormalities, such that medical interventions seem both appropriate and effective. Similarly, Don Grubin and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice: An Introduction
• Part I  Securing Spaces, Im/mobilizing Desires
• Part II  The Unfreedom of Mobility
• Part III  Aesthetic and Affective Resistances
• Afterword: Mobile Desires
• Bibliography
• Index