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

Abstract

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.

Contextualismo sexual

“…Como argumenta la bióloga Stacey Ritz, con respecto a la cuestión sobre el sexo celular, "en el momento de definir la organización de un experimento, las prácticas del trabajo de laboratorio experimental instancian una definición material de sexo" (Ritz, 2016, p. 320). Citando a la teórica de la ciencia feminista Karen Barad, señala que "haciendo eso, estamos participando en 'instancias interesadas de poder... con consecuencias materiales reales' sobre cómo entendemos el impacto del sexo en la salud" (Ritz, 2016, p. 320;ver Barad, 1996; para debates críticos sobre la política del NIH sobre SABV, ver Pape, 2021;Eliot & Richardson, 2016;Richardson et al, 2015).…”

Sins of inquiry: How to criticize scientific pursuits

“…Consider the operation of agencies that fund science, such as the National Science Foundation and the European Research Council (Elliott and McKaughan 2009, Kitcher 2011, Shaw 2018, 2021. In such contexts, the number of projects (i.e., pursuits) vastly outstrips the available funding.…”

“…Furthermore, the status of SABV in relation to both moral and an epistemic features is rightly contested (see Epstein 2007, Richardson et al 2015, Gompers 2019, Pape 2021. Apokritic norms, like other norms, can themselves be the subject of criticism and revision.…”

Cultivated co-production: Sexual health, human rights, and the revision of the ICD

“…Rather than acknowledge the inextricability of the natural and the social, the project leaders tried in vain to keep their attention strictly on genomics. Other co-productionist studies have pointed to various natural and social entities that are coproduced − search engines and visions of Europe (Mager, 2017); vaginal microbicides and gender and sexual ideologies (Montgomery, 2012); science and emotion (Pickersgill, 2012); sex differences and biomedical research policies (Pape, 2021) − but generally have characterized the actors either as being oblivious to the actual relations between 'science' and 'society' or as manifestly committed to keeping the 'non-scientific' out of sight.…”