Potency and Power Estrogen, Cosmetics, and Labeling in Canadian Regulatory Practices, 1939-1953

Special Section: Chemical Entanglements

Potency and Power: Estrogen, Cosmetics, and Labeling in Canadian Regulatory Practices, 1939–1953

Lara Tessaro

Kent Law School, University of Kent

[e-mail]

Abstract

Building on a rich body of feminist scholarship on estrogen, this account interrogates how potent estrogenic cosmetics and consumer product labels emerged together, through the regulatory practices of scientists and lawyers, in mid-century Canada. Composed from archival and other primary sources, the story traces the development of Canada’s first cosmetic regulations – which applied only to cosmetic products containing estrogens. In 1944, “sex hormones” had been the first substances for which the Department of National Health and Welfare adopted labels in lieu of dose or potency standards under the Food and Drugs Act. With dose-response thresholds thus written out of the Sex Hormone Regulations, in 1949, regulators devised a new type of consumer product label that warned women to use estrogenic cosmetic products “with care”. Further regulatory amendments in 1950 appeared, on their face, to require positive proof of safety for estrogenic cosmetics. However, through varied administrative and enforcement practices that hinged upon “directions for use” in product labels, National Health officials quietly reintroduced dose-response logics back into estrogen regulation. As legal technologies for disciplining women consumers to regulate their own exposures, product labels were becoming instrumental. With labeling, estrogen catalyzed an early example of risk regulation in Canada.

Introduction

Today, endocrine disruption is a well-established phenomenon. The fact that industrial chemicals could disrupt endocrine systems of humans and wildlife burst into popular consciousness in the mid-1990s, with the publication of Our Stolen Future (Colborn, Dumanoski, & Myers, 1996). In translating the science to public audiences, researchers and activists have often leveraged the fact that these endocrine-disrupting chemicals can participate in humans’ and animals’ hormonal systems, including by mimicking estrogen in bodies.¹ Some scholars have critiqued the repronormative, heterosexist, transphobic, or ableist discourses that infuse these translations, which reinforce sex panics about disruption of normative bodies (Ah-King & Hayward, 2014; Di Chiro, 2010; O’Laughlin, 2016; Scott, 2009). Others have explored chemical and multispecies productions of sex, gender, and sexuality (Fausto-Stirling, 2000; Haraway, 2012; Hayward, 2014), and celebrated the queer intimacies and pleasures of hormone disruption (Chen, 2012; Pollock, 2016; Preciado, 2013). Without mongering these fears or indulging...