Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography

Description

An Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal Winner A Progressive Book of the Year A TechCrunch Favorite Read of the Year “Deeply researched and thoughtful.” ?Nature “An extended exercise in myth busting.” ?Outside “A critique of both popular and scientific understandings of the hormone, and how they have been used to explain, or even defend, inequalities of power.” ?The Observer Testosterone is a familiar villain, a ready culprit for everything from stock market crashes to the overrepresentation of men in prisons. But your testosterone level doesn’t actually predict your appetite for risk, sex drive, or athletic prowess. It isn’t the biological essence of manliness?in fact, it isn’t even a male sex hormone. So what is it, and how did we come to endow it with such superhuman powers? T’s story begins when scientists first went looking for the chemical essence of masculinity. Over time, it provided a handy rationale for countless behaviors?from the boorish to the enviable. Testosterone focuses on what T does in six domains: reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting, addressing heated debates like whether high-testosterone athletes have a natural advantage as well as disagreements over what it means to be a man or woman. “This subtle, important book forces rethinking not just about one particular hormone but about the way the scientific process is embedded in social context.” ?Robert M. Sapolsky, author of Behave “A beautifully written and important book. The authors present strong and persuasive arguments that demythologize and defetishize T as a molecule containing quasi-magical properties, or as exclusively related to masculinity and males.” ?Los Angeles Review of Books “Provides fruitful ground for understanding what it means to be human, not as isolated physical bodies but as dynamic social beings.”

About the Author

Katrina Karkazis is a cultural anthropologist who spent fifteen years at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, working at the intersection of science, technology, gender studies, and bioethics. She is Carol Zicklin Endowed Chair in the Honors Academy at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Senior Research Fellow with the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale University. Her writing appears in the New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired, among other outlets, and her piece “The Masculine Mystique of T” was published in the New York Review of Books.