In this chapter, I contest the assumed primacy of technoscientific and biochemical methods in determining what human (and other) bodies are made of. From a perspective grounded in critical race, cultural, and performance studies, as well as embodied artistic research, I offer an expanded molecular theory of identity that foregrounds the radical asymmetry of what are still too often glossed as sociocultural signs or attributes rather than material substances. This argument builds upon and extends my previous theorization of technique as knowledge (Spatz, 2015, 2020a). I begin by surveying a handful of recent critical treatments of “hard”—that is, technoscientifically graspable—physical and chemical molecules that foreground their racial and gendered construction. I then consider the politics implied by a more expansive conception of the molecular, comparing and contrasting this with theories of the molecular that follow Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The final section begins to imagine the implications of such a conceptual shift for experimental research methods. These include not only a richer way to theorize embodied difference but also a radical reshuffling of the dominant disciplinary hierarchies that attach greater epistemic primacy to more quantitative methods. To understand the radical asymmetry of the molecular, I argue, we must recognize that critical race theory and other politicized new materialisms refer as much to the substance of the world as do the harder sciences.

Hard and soft molecules

As Natasha Myers explains in Rendering Life Molecular, the discovery and definition of biochemical molecules as “the stuff of life” has revolutionized the scientific understanding of human embodiment and led, like other technoscientific developments, to the invention and implementation of technologies with far-reaching impact that only continues to grow. “In the twenty-first century,” Myers writes, “life and living bodies have been rendered thoroughly molecular” (2015, p x), so that the very word life in some contexts becomes almost synonymous with an analysis of the cells, tissues, and molecules that biochemistry, neuroscience, physiology, and other technoscientific disciplines investigate.