How governments weaponize genetic and hormone tests to control borders and bodies
New research reveals that DNA testing in immigration enforcement and hormone screening in sports aren't neutral scientific tools—they're mechanisms of state control that reinforce racial and gender hierarchies. For policymakers and organizations using these tests, the finding poses a uncomfortable question: what are we actually measuring, and who bears the cost?
Originaltitel: Testinaming: Strategic molecularizations through endocrine and genetic testing
<p>What do tests performed on human bodies tell us? Hormones and genetics have become increasingly central to contemporary understandings of identities and kinship. In this article, narratives around hormone and genetic testing are examined through two examples: the use of DNA testing in migration control and hormone testing in sports. In the name of “fair sport” and “fair migration”, people are being tested because of regulations by the federation or by the state. Testing is said to produce better knowledge, where knowledge without testing is unreliable and defined as a problem which constitutes a risk to fair participation or belonging. In the narratives examined in this article, there is a simultaneous stabilization and destabilization of identity, gender and race. We argue for a slightly different articulation of molecularization, compared to how it has previously been conceptualized in canonized scholarly work. When considered as strategic and entangled with gender, race, and sexuality, molecularization appears as not only a development within or from biopolitics but also as a part of necropolitics. The relation between politics and molecularization is here centred on control by knowing the individual through biological tests, a form of control which we call testinaming.</p>