Hormones are complex biosocial objects that provoke myriad cultural narratives through their association with social activities and identities, and these narratives have the power to shape people’s lived realities and bodies. While hormones were historically conceptualised as ‘master molecules’ capable of controlling various life processes, their explanatory potential has now been overshadowed by technoscientific developments like omics- and gene-based biotechnologies that have reframed how human bodies and behaviours are understood. Considering these shifts, this paper asks what roles hormones perform and what stories they are arousing today. Through a patchwork of four hormone stories about contraception, gender hacking, birth, and autism-specific horse therapy, we show how hormones remain vital protagonists in the constitution of bodies, affects, environments, places, politics, and selves in the contemporary period. Building on new materialist approaches, we adopt and extend the notion of ‘emplotment’ to encapsulate how hormones act as key characters in our plots. They are working to complicate dominant understandings of what bodies are and can be in new ways as they mediate different plots of bodily experience, in ways showing the ongoing powerful salience of hormones and their ascendancy in the present.

激素是复杂的生物社会对象，通过与社会活动和身份的联系引发无数的文化叙事，而这些叙事有能力塑造人们的生活现实和身体。虽然激素在历史上被概念化为能够控制各种生命过程的“主分子”，但它们的解释潜力现在已被技术科学的发展所掩盖，例如基于组学和基因的生物技术，这些技术重新定义了人体和行为的理解方式。考虑到这些转变，本文探讨了激素的作用以及它们在今天引发了哪些故事。通过四个关于避孕、性别黑客、生育和自闭症特异性马疗法的激素故事的拼凑，我们展示了激素如何在当代的身体、情感、环境、地点、政治和自我构成中保持重要的主角。在新唯物主义方法的基础上，我们采用并扩展了“情节”的概念，以概括荷尔蒙如何在我们的情节中充当关键人物。他们正在努力以新的方式使人们对身体是什么和可以是什么的主流理解复杂化，因为它们调解了身体体验的不同情节，以显示激素持续强大的显着性及其在当前的优势。