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The politics of plasticity: Sex and gender in the 21st century brain

Kleinherenbrink, A.V.

Publication date 2016 Document Version Final published version

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Citation for published version (APA): Kleinherenbrink, A. V. (2016). The politics of plasticity: Sex and gender in the 21st century brain.

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Download date:24 Sep 2021 Chapter two Situating sex, situating science

‘neurological determinism is most powerfully contested through neurological intimacy’ (Wilson 1998, 417)

Introduction

In the previous chapter, I have discussed how the possibility that sex/gender differences in the brain—insofar as these can be said to exist—emerge from the interaction between biological and environmental factors, rather than from exclusively genetic and hormonal factors, is systematically omitted or even explicitly rejected in contemporary research. I have reviewed available evidence that suggests the human brain is, indeed, responsive to gender- specific experiences. In this chapter, I take my cue from this overlooked perspective in order to explore the critical potential of plasticity as an alternative starting-point for thinking about sex, gender, and the brain. Here, I engage with plasticity not so much as an opportunity to critique brain organization theory but as an opportunity to establish what Wilson names ‘neurological intimacy’ (Wilson 1998, 417). As the ‘Decade of the Brain’ drew to a close, Wilson warned feminist scholars that offering purely sociocultural explanations as an alternative to neurobiological determinism maintains an unrealistic separation between the natural and the cultural and forecloses potentially valuable sources of knowledge. Instead, she argued, engaging with the fleshy materiality of the body will uncover a complexity that attests to the unfeasibility of gender essentialism and biological determinism. Given the fact that plasticity is popularly understood as limitless malleability facilitating full self-determination, the challenge addressed in this chapter is, then, to mobilize plasticity as a powerful argument against biological determinism without resorting to social determinism.15 A number of feminist writers have argued for a performative account of sex/gender in the brain that understands the brain not as a passive surface inscribed by its outside, but as generative and agentic in its materiality (e.g. Pitts-Taylor 2016; Roy 2012; Schmitz and

15. Parts of this chapter have appeared, in an earlier version, in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies. See Kleinherenbrink (2014).

Höppner 2014). Following this line of work, I will approach the question of how and when sex/gender might come to matter in the brain by reading the work of Susan Oyama, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad together. I focus on these authors specifically, because they each offer unique insights that pertain to this question. Oyama’s (2000a; 2000b [1985]) work on developmental system biology offers one of the most concrete and effective accounts of the dynamic, or in her terms ‘constructivist’ (178), interaction of biology and environmental factors in development. Haraway’s work (e.g. 1991, 1997) similarly engages with the entanglement of the material and the discursive, and offers unparalleled insight into the ethical stakes in producing scientific knowledge. Barad’s (2007, 2003) work extends that of Haraway by offering an analysis of the nature of scientific experimentation, and its relationship with the scientific object. All three thinkers represent what has been recently termed ‘new materialisms’, a school of thought that reworks the nature-nurture dichotomy in ways that refuse the reduction of one to the other by taking seriously the active, generative force of the (biological) material.

Mobilizing plasticity

Plasticity marks a potentially critical tool for feminism. Despite decades of feminist critiques of neuroscience and the proliferation of alternative theoretical perspectives, a recognisable field of empirical ‘feminist neuroscience’ that would study sex/gender as socially embodied and mediated is still lacking. For feminist scholars interested in how sex/gender might come to matter in the brain, plasticity may provide a productive ‘point of entry’ for such a practice, prompting work that does not merely critique certain accounts of brain sex but mobilises neuroscientific methods to develop alternative accounts. One promising development in that direction is the NeuroGenderings Network. Established in 2010, this international and transdisciplinary ‘platform for … neurofeminism’ aims to critically reflect on current neuroscientific practices, to foster dialogues across disciplines, and to develop approaches for a feminist neuroscience (Schmitz and Höppner 2014, 2). Since its instalment, the network has generated an on-going series of conferences and a number of collective publications (e.g. Bluhm, Jacobson & Maibom 2012; Dussauge & Kaiser 2012a; Schmitz & Höppner 2014). These publications mostly review existing neuroscientific work and suggest improvements for research practices, but also circulate some empirical work. Plasticity is an important leitmotif in this ‘neurofeminist’ literature. For example, Schmitz (2010) asks ‘To which extent brain structures and functions mirror ‘gendered’ experiences’ (71), noting the paucity of research on

38 this issue. Similarly, Vidal (2012) argues that the challenge to feminist scholars is no longer ‘to deny that there are brain differences between the sexes, but to find out their origin and to assess their significance in real-life situations’ (300). She suggests that ‘the revelation of the dynamism of brain plasticity’ will guide this challenge (300-301). Jordan-Young and Rumiati (2012) also propose more research on brain plasticity as a remedy to ‘neurosexism’ by suggesting an intersectional approach. Given the fact that experiments observe sex differences on a group level, even though between-group overlap and within-group variation are substantial, mapping the interplay of different group-based experiences impinging on brain development would be more enlightening than current attempts to map group-level brain differences to only one identity category:

more research on the ways in which sex/gender patterns in the brain and behavior are specific to social class, ethnicity, and nation might provide much more illumination on the concrete mechanisms through which the social world shapes behavior, and even becomes embodied (brain) difference. (312)

Jordan-Young and Rumiati challenge that ‘hardwiring’ is not only a scientifically poor metaphor but also an unethical one, and that plasticity should be foregrounded instead (311). Is plasticity, then, an ethical metaphor? Insofar as plasticity prompts us to conceptualise the material body, and in particular the brain, as inherently historical and contingent, and to understand the science of brain sex as necessarily partial and embodied, I would answer that yes, it can be an ethical metaphor. However, it is crucial to realise that plasticity already carries different connotations. The strong resonance between popular plasticity discourse and the values of neoliberal capitalism, for example, has been discussed amongst neurofeminists (e.g. Pitts-Taylor 2010). It is therefore crucial to attend to struggles over the production of knowledge. As Kaiser and Dussauge (2015) note, brain discourses are largely beyond the control of feminists and other social movements, and to engage with them risks ‘buying into a political economy of biomedical knowledge’ (11) in which they have little control. In addition, as I have noted in the previous chapter, plasticity arguments do not necessarily subvert biological determinism. They are easily incorporated into an account of two natural groups possessing different degrees or kinds of plasticity. These issues, which I will come back to in the following chapters, point to the necessity of developing an account of sex/gender and the brain that neither replaces biological determinism with social determinism nor combines the two in a hybrid account, but resists both.

Decades of feminist scholarship on the dichotomies of nature/nurture and sex/gender offer a wealth of insights for the development of a determinism-resistant account. From the 1970s onwards, feminists usefully employed the sex-gender distinction to counter biological essentialism by locating the oppression of women in cultural practices (e.g. Rubin 1975). The social relations between men and women were understood as connected to, but not fully circumscribed by the sexed body: biology may be a given, but the social relations that determine the significance of bodily sex may function otherwise. This sex-gender division is still promoted as best practice in a range of feminist arenas (e.g. in gender-sensitive medicine, see Chapter 5), but many feminist scholars critique and rework the distinction.16 One of their most pressing concerns pertains to the normativity and particularity of women as a gender category: what kinds of experiences constitute being a woman, if different women (e.g. white women compared to women of colour, or heterosexual women compared to lesbian women) experience womanhood in different, sometimes irreconcilable ways (Spelman 1988; Butler 1990)? A different objection is that the separation of sex and gender relies on and reinstates the ontological separation of nature and nurture, thereby maintaining a division of labour between the biological and medical sciences on the one hand, and feminist theory on the other (Gatens 1983; Oudshoorn 1994). This division of labour implies that sex might be analysed without paying attention to gender (and vice versa), thus separating the body from experience. However, as I have discussed in the previous chapter, the classification of bodies as either male or female is not simply a neutral or natural given order.17 Not only is the way in which science chooses to ‘carve nature at its joints’ culturally conditioned, the development of the physical body itself is contingent upon the social and material conditions of our existence. Therefore, many feminist scholars claim that the distinction between sex and gender (and by analogy, between nature and nurture, mind and body, etc.) is unintelligible. Most famously, Judith Butler (1990) asserts that sex has ‘been gender all along’ (8). Gender, in her account, is not a state of being, but rather a doing: a performative act, shaped within a heteronormative power matrix that requires two genders. Sex, perceived as a fixed ground or boundary, materialises in this process of construction (Butler 1993). Butler’s theory has been and still is extremely influential in feminist theories, yet some critique her for ‘conflat[ing] the being of a thing with the mode in which it is known’ (Colebrook 2000, 78). So-called ‘new materialists’ address this alleged shortcoming in Butler’s work. They refuse the representationalism that reduces materiality to discourse, and foreground matter itself

16. For a full discussion of the sex/gender distinction, see Mikkola (2011). 17. This is even true for the classification of chromosomes, see Kraus (2000) and Richardson (2013).

40 as performative and agentic. Karen Barad (2003), for example, forcefully asks: ‘Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is figured as passive and immutable, or at best inherits a potential for change derivatively from language and culture?’ (801). Vicki Kirby (2008), playing on Butler’s assertion that ‘sex has been gender all along’, raises the question of whether culture has not been nature all along. Instead of bracketing the body, this line of work theorises the body as ‘changing and changeable, as transformable’, highlighting it’s ‘active response to change and contingency’ and the ways it ‘act[s] upon the world’ (Birke 1999, 45). Change and difference, here, are not imposed on inert matter. Rather, matter itself (including, but nor restricted to, organic matter) is performative, a doing rather than a being. Accounts of ‘what … bodies are that … inscription is possible’ (Grosz 2004, 2, my emphasis) supplement accounts of sociocultural practices that inscribe bodies.18 The performative nature of matter and the entanglement of the material and the discursive are not merely asserted via philosophical reasoning but also gleaned from the natural and biological sciences, where notions of non-linearity, emergence, and complex self- organisation are becoming increasingly prominent. In the context of neuroscience, Elizabeth Wilson (1998) pays close attention to research demonstrating ‘neurocognition’s indigenous malleability’ (201). She rejects what she sees as the typical feminist response to biological essentialism: ‘a mishmash of environmentalism, social construction, and discursive analysis, all of which leave the nature of neurological, genetic, or biochemical matter to one side’ (200). Critiques that conceptualise the social as that which ‘delivers difference and malleability to otherwise barren neurological matter’ lack critical and political power because ‘they have relied on, and reauthorized, a separation between the inside and the outside, the static and the changeable, the natural and the political, the chromosomal and the cultural’ (16, 200). Feminist engagements with neurological matter reveal ambiguities and complexities not captured through the lens of brain organisation theory. Rather than dichotomous sex and sexuality, they encounter ‘perverse and disseminate sexual forms’ (Wilson 2015, 61), ‘a thousand tiny sexes’ (Grosz 1993, quoted in Roy 2012, 225), a mosaic or intersex brain (Joel 2011), or a queer brain (Dussauge & Kaiser 2012b). An explicitly new materialist framework conceptualises this proliferation of difference and complexity as material-semiotic rather than as social inscription upon a passive, inert surface (Pitts-Taylor 2010; Roy 2012; Schmitz &

18. New materialist feminism is related to other ‘material-semiotic’ frameworks, such as Actor-Network Theory. In addition, it is often associated with other recent turns to materiality and immanence, including object- oriented ontology and speculative realism (but there are crucial differences: see Åsberg, Thiele & Van der Tuin 2015).

Höppner 2014). The latter would, as Wilson (1998) warns, ‘[abandon] neurobiology to the very biologism it claims to be contesting’ (16). In the next section, I will mobilise three scholars associated with new materialist feminism in order to give an account of the plasticity of sex differences that avoids this mistake.

How matter comes to matter

The psychologist and philosopher of science Susan Oyama is not mentioned as often in discussions of feminist materialism as one might expect given the strong resonance of her work with that of Haraway, Barad, and other scholars more frequently referenced as key figures in the genre (but see Kirby 1999). Her work, especially The Ontogeny of Information from 1985, has had a significant impact in the philosophy of biology, laying the foundation for developmental systems theory. In my opinion, her theory of ‘constructivist interactionism’ constitutes one of the most practical and effective critiques of the nature-nurture dichotomy, and offers a hands-on material-semiotic account of development. Oyama (2000b [1985]) takes issue with the fact that scientists routinely argue that the nature-nurture debate is dead, ‘sound the rallying cry “interactionism”, then proceed to discuss genetically encoded instructions and environmentally shaped traits’ (10). The language of ‘genetic predispositions’ and ‘limits to flexibility’ (2000a, 136), she argues, might seem less dualistic than older formulations but in fact still constitutes a form of preformationism:

saying that of course nature combines with, or interacts with, nurture suggests a continued reliance on a biological nature defined before development begins and merely modulated or deflected by environmental nurture. (Ibid.)

One of the main problems she identifies is the conceptualisation of causality commonly employed in theories of development. In particular, she targets the metaphor of the information gene: ‘The genome as constituting rules, instructions, or a program …. is so common a notion as not to seem metaphoric at all’ (2000b [1985], 59). Against the idea of genetic programming, Oyama argues that developmental information only becomes ‘biologically relevant’ in the process of ontogeny (16); it ‘neither preexists its operations nor arises from random disorder’ (3). For Oyama, the causal status of both genes and environmental influences depends on the process of development; without it, they cannot be said to be causes at all, and developmental information contained in them cannot be said to exist. To speak of information in the genes—

42 or, for that matter, in the environment—is only meaningful ‘as it is constituted as “information” by its developmental system. The result is not more information but significant information’ (16). This information, furthermore, does not relate to form, but to variation (179): ‘Information is a difference that makes a difference’ (3). In Oyama’s account, the effects of different developmental factors can only be determined in relation to one another: a gene is associated with different outcomes in different environments, and an environmental factor has different effects on different genomes. This is not because genes work as switches programmed to do A if B and do C if D, but because biological matter is fundamentally interactive:

If matter is inert, then organized processes can be explained only by reference to a structuring intelligence. But if it is interactive (think of any chemical reaction) under changing, interdependent constraints, such outside direction is not needed. (173)

The issue here is not that both genes and the environment are necessary for development to take place (something with which any scientist would agree) but that ‘there is no intelligible distinction between inherited (biological, genetically based) and acquired (environmentally mediated) characteristics’ (138). This is not to say that no useful distinctions of any kind can be made between, for example, the influence of hormonal levels and the influence of sensory input, but it does mean that the influence of each factor cannot be articulated without paying attention to the way it interacts with other factors: ‘Causation is multiply contingent, and influences both select each other and determine each other’s effects’ (2000b [1985], 24). Oyama’s reconceptualisation of development and developmental information changes the meaning of nature and nurture: ‘nature and nurture are not alternative causes but product and process’ (2000b [1985], 148). For her, nature properly refers ‘not to some static reality standing behind the changing characteristics of the phenotype, but to the changing organism itself’ (2000a, 181), and nurture should denote ‘all interactions that produce, maintain, and change natures’ (Ibid.). Crucially, this is an ongoing process: ‘coming into being continues throughout life’ (2000a, 168). Oyama’s conceptualization of the organism as emerging from the dynamic, ongoing interaction of factors that select and determine each other’s effects is echoed and expanded in Donna Haraway’s (2003) Whiteheadian formulation that ‘Beings do not preexist their relating’ (6) and in Karen Barad’s (2007) aphorism ‘relata do not preexist relations’ (140). For Haraway and Barad, bodies—not just living organisms, but all objects—emerge from their relationships,

43 rather than the other way around. All three thinkers therefore approach objects as constructed sites of change, but do not relegate them as purely ideological. Barad (2007) explains the relationship between the material and the semiotic as:

Neither discursive practices not material phenomena are ontologically or epistemologically prior. … Neither is reducible to the other. … Neither is articulated or articulable in the absence of the other; matter and meaning are mutually constituted. (152)

In addition, these thinkers articulate all bodies as temporary, since objects transform as soon as new relations arise: ‘the world is a knot in motion’ (Haraway 2003, 6). Rather than static being, there is only constant becoming. As such, the very notions of cause and effect demand reconsideration: ‘Changing patterns of difference are neither pure cause nor pure effect; indeed, they are that which effects, or rather enacts, a causal structure, differentiating cause and effect’ (Barad 2007, 137). The view that bodies only take on concrete characteristics in their relations and because of their relations has ramifications for the way we understand scientific practices. Haraway and Barad both challenge the prevailing understanding of scientific observation as non-invasive witnessing. Instead, knowledge claims become locally embodied and historically contingent (Haraway 1991). Haraway proposes to ‘switch metaphors’ (188): instead of understanding scientific vision as a gaze from nowhere reflecting nature, she emphasises diffraction: ‘Diffraction does not produce “the same” displaced, as reflection and refraction do. Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction’ (2004 [1992], 70). Diffraction shows that knowledge is always partial, local, and contingent on the perspective of the knower: ‘Accounts of a “real” world do not, then, depend on a logic of “discovery”, but on a power-charged social relation of “conversation”’ (1991, 198). Scientific ‘observation’ is thus not a one-way process laying bare the object, but rather a two-way process between different actors in which certain aspects of its actors become relevant. Barad (2007) adopts Haraway’s notion of diffraction, weaving together ontological, epistemological and ethical concerns: ‘Making knowledge is not simply about making facts but about making worlds, or rather, it is about making specific worldly configurations’ (91). She argues that practices of representation affect (and effect) the object of investigation not so much because they mediate access to the object, but because they co-constitute the object in their relation to it. It is in their ‘intra-action’ that actors become determinate, that they acquire their

44 characteristics.19 Consequently, ‘agencies of observation’ (2007, 114) are part of the phenomena they aim to measure; and measurements refer not strictly to the scientific object, but to the whole scientific apparatus. This apparatus is a material-discursive phenomenon, involving not just some pieces of equipment but a ‘multitude of practices’ such as various design constraints, financial factors, political influences, legal constraints, professional training, and many more (203-204). The scientific apparatus delineates who or what is the object and who is the subject of knowledge. There is thus no inherent boundary between the knower and the known. To fix and to naturalise such boundaries is to postulate determinate ‘Cartesian cuts’ (114). On the other hand, to represent boundaries as situated, embodied, and contingent—which Barad terms ‘agential’ cuts (148) is a more ethical way of doing science.20 By making explicit the processes by which our scientific practices produce ‘differences that matter’, we can account for the way we participate in the marking of bodies of scientific ‘objects’ (348).

How sex/gender comes to matter in the brain

The work of Oyama, Haraway, and Barad inspires an account of how sex/gender might come to matter in the brain that offers a viable alternative to brain organisation theory. This account takes the material brain seriously as an active agent in development rather than casting it as an inert surface upon which effects from external factors are inscribed. In addition, it takes the scientific setting in which brain sex is observed as a relevant factor in its materialisation, rather than as a neutral backdrop against which biological facts can be observed. As an example, I will consider the experiment by Janice Juraska and colleagues, which I briefly discussed in the previous chapter. However, this kind of interpretation should be applicable to all kinds of sex differences in the brains of humans and other animals. In the 1980s, around the time that Oyama’s influential The Ontogeny of Information was first published, Juraska and her team performed a series of experiments on sexual differentiation in cognitive regions of rat brains, namely, the hippocampus and the cerebral cortex. Interested

19. Barad, here, aligns with Oyama’s (2000b [1985]) argument that only development itself can constitute ‘information’ in the genes or in the environment before their actual interaction, and what genes or environmental factors are cannot be said. As Barad (2007) makes clear by drawing on Niels Bohr’s understanding of quantum physics, this is not simply because we cannot know what they are, but more radically, because they cannot become determinate outside of relations. 20. See also Nancy Tuana (1983). Similar to Susan Oyama, she argues for an understanding of development as dynamic interaction: ‘genotype does not determine a set of characteristics or potentials (a human nature), but specifies patterns of reactions of a developing organism to the environment it encounters’ (628). As such, a trait can only be ‘inherited relative to a particular environment’ (629). Akin to Barad’s ‘agential cuts’, Tuana writes that ‘Distinctions can be made, but they will be time, situation, and value relative. … Such distinctions will not report “biological facts”’ ( 631).

45 in the impact of the developmental environment, they reared littermates in two different laboratory settings: an isolated condition with few stimuli, and an enriched cohabitation condition. The results showed that in the cognitive areas of the rat brain, the size and even the direction of sex differences varied as a function of housing conditions (Juraska et al. 1985). The first experiments focused on the dentate gyrus, which is involved in memory-formation and spatial navigation. Dendritic trees in this area were known to continue growing after weaning. Reflecting back in a later review, Juraska writes: ‘What we found was surprising enough that we repeated the experiment with a new set of rats’ (1991, 107). Whereas males had more dendritic material than females in the isolated condition, the difference was fully reversed in the enriched condition, with females displaying larger dendritic trees (Juraska et al. 1985). The reversal of the sex difference was driven largely by the difference between female rats in the isolated condition and female rats in the enriched condition. Put differently, the females showed greater hippocampal plasticity than the males. Literature on brain organisation theory cites Juraska’s work as an example of sex differences in plasticity. As such, it takes the study as evidence for hardwired brain sex. Cahill (2005), for example, cites Juraska’s work in an article in Scientific American in which he defends the idea that brain sex is hardwired before birth: ‘Even the neurons in the hippocampus behave differently in males and females’ (44). In his interpretation of Juraska’s work, then, brain sex is taken as a given, as a programmed process, and all following interactions and changes in the brain are considered as a function of brain sex; as if male and female brains each contain their own blueprint to ‘do A if B, do C if D’. Understood this way, even if the brain changes under the influence of the environment, brain sex as an underlying essence, as the blueprint carrying information, remains the same. When we view Juraska’s results in terms of Oyama’s constructive interactionism, we can give a different account, one that considers the way in which sex differences in the brain emerge from the dynamic interplay of physiological and environmental factors. Here, the brain does not respond to the environment because it runs on a program containing information about what to do in case of a specific input-event, but it responds simply because it is fundamentally responsive matter. If we assert that brains, as part of living organisms, are not static beings but dynamic, on-going processes of becoming, then the environmental influences in Juraska’s experiment do not simply reveal what brain sex is by eliciting a response from a sex-specific program, but intra-act with the continuous process of what brain sex is becoming. Based on Oyama’s understanding of causality as multiply contingent and of causes as mutually constitutive, we can see that physiological factors (e.g. chromosomal sex) matter to

46 this becoming of brain sex. But how they matter depends crucially on the environment: the effect of sex is not uniform across environments. Vice versa, how environmental factors matter to the emerging phenotype is fundamentally dependent on the rats’ physiological characteristics: the effect of the environment is not uniform across sex. In other words, physiology and environmental factors must be articulated through one another—even as they cannot be reduced to one another—because they are mutually constituted (see Barad 2007). So rather than only paying attention to how sex mediates the influence of environmental factors, or only paying attention to how environmental factors mediate the influence of sex, only a double or integrated perspective that takes into account both principles at the same time can fully account for how sex differences in the brain emerge. Neurological matter is then not a— blank or sexed—surface upon which environmental influences are inscribed. Instead, it is a difference that makes a difference, a force participating in the process of development along with other difference-makers, in which the organism is made anew at every moment. The interplay of these difference-makers gives rise to brain sex, itself another difference that, in turn, contributes to other differences. Sexual difference, then, does not refer to essences, but to dynamic relations. The idea that sexual difference materialises within specific material-discursive practices—either in a scientific setting or otherwise—is consequential. If sexual difference is only determinate due to specific arrangements, it can always function otherwise, and the future of sexual difference is radically open. As Juraska (1998) herself noted, given the fact that ‘sex differences can be induced and even reversed under various environmental conditions and are, therefore, dynamic’, it is ‘impossible to make a generalization about the nature of sex differences in the brain’ (20). It is therefore not possible, based on Juraska’s results, to predict the developmental outcome of rats with a similar genetic constitution in yet another environment; we cannot even assume sexual difference will be binary or present at all. This means that brain sex cannot be studied as a purely physiological phenomenon, but must always be studied in relation to its context. This account of how sex/gender relates to the brain does not do away with the notion of sex altogether by trading it in favour of gender. To do so would amount to the loss of ‘the body itself as anything but a blank page for social inscriptions, including those of biological discourse’ (Haraway 1991, 197). As Haraway notes in the context of primatology, accounts that conceptualise biological difference ‘as situational, not intrinsic’ change ‘the biological politics of the body’ (200). ‘The point is not that these new stories ... are simply true or not open to contestation and conversation’, she adds (Ibid.), but rather that they are preferable because they

47 constitute a situated, and therefore more ethical mode of knowledge production. Crucially, this entails not only situating brain sex in a developmental environment, but also situating it in the scientific context that makes it visible. The environment of Juraska’s rats is not limited to their cages; it expands to the entire scientific apparatus involved. It is one of the most familiar questions in laboratory science: how well do these results translate to ‘real-life’ settings? The language of confounds and artefacts in which scientists are trained suggests that there is, at least in theory, a perfectly neutral set-up in which such ‘real’ or ‘natural’ facts can be observed. Yet we should not be tempted into thinking that some kind of natural form observable in wildlife lies somewhere inside our lab rats. For Oyama (2000b), ‘the belief that variation is deviation from an internal ideal’ rests on a false distinction between the essential and the accidental (25). Instead, there is contingency: the variations found in the lab are inherently bound up with scientific practices, just as variations found in ‘the wild’ are inherently bound up with that environment. Hence, our scientific observations cannot determine natural facts (because there is, strictly speaking, no such thing), only context-specific phenomena. This means that sex differences in the brain, observed in a scientific setting, should not only be considered in light of the social factors that have impacted the brains of test subjects before they arrived at the lab. Rather, the materialisation of these differences in the form of brain scans is fundamentally inseparable from the particulars of the instruments, and from the technological, financial, political, and cultural factors affecting the choices and assumptions made by researchers (see also Birke, Bryld, & Lykke, 2004). The perspective offered here can be employed to re-read the connectome study (Ingalhalikar et al. 2014a) discussed in the previous chapter. The authors assert that the emergence of sex differences with age indicates that sex-specific developmental trajectories are pre-programmed at birth (825). As they mature, male and female brains specialise in different directions–a sex difference in plasticity (specifically: in maturation). However, the works of Oyama, Barad and Haraway discussed here offer strong reasons to insist that that boys’ and girls’ experiences contribute to their brain development. Importantly, to assert this does not necessarily imply that their brains are a passive, neutral receptacle for gendered inscriptions. Instead, the perspective elaborated here acknowledges the force of both biological and cultural factors. It would be wrong to assert that brains are ‘blank slates’, but it would be equally wrong to say that brain sex has a normal or natural shape. It is therefore very well possible that a shared experience has different effects, on average, on boys and girls because it interacts with genetic or hormonal factors. At the same time, the between-group overlap and within-group variation in the connectome data suggests that this effect is not universal or homogenous but interacts

48 dynamically with a range of other physiological and social characteristics that differ between individuals (e.g. BMI or social class). Furthermore, Barad’s (2007) work suggests that the differences observed in such a scientific setting are, strictly speaking, not located in the subjects’ brains, but rather enacted in the relationship between brains, scanners, observers, and the technosocial conditions in which these and other relevant actors are embedded.

Culture into nature, nature into culture

In A Manifesto for Cyborgs, Haraway (2004 [1985]) writes how the modern life sciences challenge and rework the male-female distinction and associated dualisms (nature-nurture, mind-body, organism-technology, etc.), shifting traditional identity categories (gender, race, and class). In the passage from an industrial society to a market based on information systems, ‘scary new networks’ replace ‘the comfortable old hierarchical dominations’ (20). Informatics and biologics pervade, translating the world into a coding problem in ‘search of a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange’ (23). Essential properties give way to boundaries, constraints, and rates of flow: ‘No objects, spaces, or bodies are sacred in themselves’ (22). These ‘informatics of domination’ register, calculate, translate, and control the body (20). Whereas this instability of categories is associated with the oppression of certain groups, Haraway argues, it also offers an opportunity to tell different stories in order to reconstruct ‘the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all our parts’ (39). Popular plasticity discourse speaks this language. It translates culture into nature and nature into culture, giving rise to new ‘neurosocialities’ in which gendered norms may be challenged, transformed, or preserved (Schmitz 2012). Plasticity-based understandings of self and society may overturn biological determinism and sex essentialism, but they may also dovetail with claims of innate sexual difference. They may invoke the social and historical embeddedness of lived bodies, but they may also obscure such bonds by thematising individualism and free choice. In other words, a plasticity-based perspective may sustain a critical, feminist analysis as well as a post-feminist, neoliberal discourse. How, then, to develop and implement the one without inviting the other? What does it mean to think the gendered subject as a specifically neuroplastic subject? Uncovering to what extent, and in which ways, brain-based understandings of sex/gender are already shaped not just by biological determinism but also by plasticity-based claims and ideas, may be required to fully appreciate what is at

49 stake in these questions. In the chapters that follow, I will therefore examine if and how plasticity shapes ways of thinking about sex and gender in three different settings: education, parenting, and mental health.