Dissolving ‘The Pill’: De-objectifying iconized pharmaceuticals for environmental reproductive justice

Anne Nørkjær Bang is a PhD student from the Department of Culture and Language at the University of Southern Denmark. Her current research is a part of the research project ‘Endocrine Economies: The Cultural Politics of Sex Hormones”. Situated within feminist cultural studies of science and technology,

Anne’s PhD project investigates how the birth control pill is imagined in contemporary Denmark and the role hormones play in these imaginaries, as they unfold in mainstream media entries, creative workshops with Pill-users, and campaign material for new contraceptive startups, envisioning the future of contraception as 'non-hormonal' detoxing from The Pill. More specifically, the project seeks to read the recent unsettlement around The Pill in Denmark concerning a moment characterized by entangled crisis, where the lines between purity and pollution, the body and the environment seem to be re-drawn and histories of the celebrated Danish welfare state are re-told and re-interpreted.

While keeping up with recent Danish ‘Pill-talk’, Anne has also written on figurations of endocrine disruption (European Journal of Cultural Studies, 2024) and on how colonial power hierarchies were negotiated in the 1980s & ‘90s print media debates over the uneven distribution of the contraceptive drug Depo-Provera between Kalaallit Nunaat and Denmark (European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2023). 

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