Leaky Bodies and the Stickiness of Testosterone in Women's Athletics

Abstract

This article argues for a critical re-evaluation of anti-doping testing practices in international athletics, performed by The International Olympic Committee and World Athletics, as overseen by the World Anti-Doping Agency. By carefully analysing anti-doping testing procedures and data taking, the conceptions of the body, with its multiplicity and sticky properties of testosterone become evident, revealing obscured connections between anti-doping and sex testing practices. Using a biopolitical framework, I trace the ways anxieties over gender, athletic ability, and race shape molecular level testing mechanisms, constructing and de-constructing the body in the process. This article draws on New Materialist theories and Feminist Science and Technology Studies scholarship, including: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s history of hormones; Sara Ahmed’s concept of ‘sticking’; Annemarie Mol’s ‘the body multiple’; Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis’s work on testosterone; and Margrit Shildrick’s theory of ‘leaky bodies’ to argue that the racialised and gendered history of testosterone continue to linger on in the ways this hormone is tested and regulated in women’s athletics. This biopolitical system of surveillance in international sports is founded on an ideal of the body as autonomous, whole, and classifiable within a sexed binary. Yet, there is a distinct tension between this understanding of the body and the ways testing is executed, which relies on leaks, extractions, dissections, and manipulations of the athlete’s bodily substances to in order to discipline it into normalising categories of sex.