Article ID: CBB034212602

Co-production, multiplied: Enactments of sex as a biological variable in US biomedicine (June 2021)

unapi

In 2016 the US National Institutes of Health introduced a policy mandating consideration of Sex as a Biological Variable (SABV) in preclinical research. In this article, I ask what, precisely, is meant by the designation of sex as a ‘biological variable’, and how has its inclusion come to take the form of a policy mandate? Given the well documented complexity of ‘sex’ and the degree to which it is politically and scientifically contested, its enactment via policy as a biological variable is not a given. I explore how sex is multiply enacted in efforts to legitimate and realize the SABV policy and consider how the analytical lens of co-production sheds light on how and why this occurs. I show that the policy works to reassert scientific and political order by addressing two institutional concerns: the so-called reproducibility crisis in preclinical research, and pervasive gender inequality across the institution of biomedicine. From here, the entity that underpins this effort – sex as a biological variable – becomes more than one thing, with enactments ranging from an assigned category, to an outcome, to a causal biological force in its own right. Sex emerges as simultaneously entangled with yet distinct from gender, and binary (female/male) yet complex in its variation. I suggest that it is in the very attempt to delineate natural from social order, and in the process create the conditions to privilege a particular kind of science and account of embodied difference, that ontological multiplicity becomes readily visible. That this multiplicity goes unrecognized points to the unifying role of an overarching ideological commitment to sex as a presumed binary and biological scientific object, the institutional dominance of which is never guaranteed.

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Authors & Contributors
Fox, Mary Frank
Luis Humberto Fabila-Castillo
Tibor Dessewffy
Berkhout, Suze G.
Dániel Váry
Weckowska, Dagmara
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Science and State
Gender
Research
Science
Power (social sciences)
Time Periods
21st century
20th century
20th century, late
Places
China
Mexico
United Kingdom
United States
Japan
Hungary
Institutions
Venezuelan Institute of Scientific Research - IVIC
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