ECOLOGY The Pharmacocarnist regime: some notes on an era Hayley Singer In The History of Animals, Aristotle described a common farming technique that would continue to be practiced through the Middle Ages, and was kept in use until the late nineteenth century. The procedure involved cutting the ovaries out of a sow to “quench” her sexual appetite, while stimulating growth in size and fatness. Aristotle’s description provides a pre-scientific articulation of connections between the control of sex, sexuality, gender and the transformation of an individual into a de-vitalised object: meat. These connections became significant for the development of the animal-industrial complex throughout the twentieth century, and they remain so today. At the turn of the 1900s in the United States, emerging research into sex hormones and reproductive biology utilised massive amounts of biological materials such as ovaries, testes, uteri and urine for experimental research. Physiologists mined slaughterhouses and farms for sources of live or freshly dead research material. Harvesting organs (and other bodily materials) from animals would become a significant part of the ritual reiterations that produced certain species as raw materials for human use, their bodies bound and penetrated by exchange value; taken as tools for pharmaceutical investigation; used as metaphors for cis- centred, heterosexual ideals of gender, sex and sexuality. When I turn to look back at the twentieth century I see it convulse under the image of a physiologist sorting through the entrails of freshly slaughtered pigs looking for embryos. From this point of view, I come to a new understanding as to why, towards the end of the twentieth century, vegan-activist Carol Adams would theorise the sexual politics of meat. The twentieth century is the era in which the term ‘gender’ was first coined by controversial psychiatrist, John Money. Differentiating gender from ‘sex’ opened up the possibility for defining individuals according to the psychologically and culturally recognised groups, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine.’ Use of such categorisation flourished at a time when the synthetic production of estrogen was exploding onto the scientific, industrial and consumer scene. Over the last twenty years, French philosopher Paul B. Preciado has tracked radical changes in the political management of human bodies from the twentieth to twenty-first century. For him, sex, sexuality and gender identity have been transformed into objects used for the political management of life. From the beginning of the 1940s, he writes, biopolitical ideals of masculinity and femininity were created under laboratory conditions. Such highly mediated gender production has created a regime, which he calls pharmaco-pornographic. This term references the molecular (pharmaco) and semiotic-technical (pornographic) government of sexual subjectivity, of which the Pill and Playboy are the model offspring.