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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) The politics of plasticity: Sex and gender in the 21st century brain Kleinherenbrink, A.V. Publication date 2016 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Kleinherenbrink, A. V. (2016). The politics of plasticity: Sex and gender in the 21st century brain. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) 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). 37 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. 39 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