The peer-reviewed articles in this issue invite readers to ponder scientific questions about sex, gender, and brains that are entangled with, instead of opposed to, theoretical insights from gender and sexuality studies. Written by an international group of interdisciplinary scholars who work at the junction of brain sciences and gender studies, these papers do not eschew the idea that sex-linked biology has effects on brain development or functioning, but they do challenge the idea that sex or gender are binary, fixed, unitary phenomena. They most especially challenge the idea that “neuroscience” or “sex biology” indicate that social formations related to gender and sexuality proceed from something about structural or functional differences in our brains.
In the past decade, while feminist scientists and scholars from diverse disciplines have been radically exploding the idea of the “sexed brain,” claims about so-called female and male brains have become more, rather than less, entrenched in mainstream sciences and the popular press. The notion that it is meaningful, useful, and indeed even necessary to understand brains as either female or male is often introduced via the Trojan horse of “gender specific medicine” or by appropriating the feminist goal of ameliorating historical male biases in science and medicine. Given female-male disparities in important brain-based conditions like migraine, depression, and autism, the argument goes, an approach focused on sex differences in the brain is the best bet for understanding these conditions. In part because of the way feminist language and some feminist histories (especially the narrative of the feminist health movements of the late twentieth century) have been coopted to advance reductive and biologically deterministic claims, we believe that every feminist scholar and activist should understand some basics about sex/gender and brains. Social, political, and legal discussions about sex, gender, and sexuality increasingly reference neuroscience, and the stakes are too high to leave these discussions to a small group of experts.
Consider this episode, which is still unfolding: In December 2018, the Center for Law, Science, and Innovation at Arizona State University’s law school launched a two-year project on “the complex web of legal, ethical and policy implications” of what they identified as “sex differences of the brain at all levels, from structure and function to nervous systems” (ASU Law 2018). Their first order of business was a closed workshop where participants included brain researchers, clinicians, legal scholars, and judges and the conversation was led by one of the most vocal opponents of feminist contributions to neuroscience research and theory. A press release for the project emphasized that, while current justification for focusing on sex differences in the brain is mostly the idea that doing so will lead to better treatment for brain-based disorders that affect women and men at different rates (like depression, Alzheimer’s, and autism), proponents of the idea of “brain sex” see law and social policy changes as a logical outcome. Project participants suggested that sex-based brain differences provide a rational basis for treating women and men differently in a multitude of legal settings that include “forensic evidence, workplace discrimination and equality in education.” ASU law professor Betsy Grey used diversity-friendly language to suggest that a failure to “recognize and embrace real differences” in women’s and men’s brains leads to worse legal outcomes for women.
At almost the same time the ASU project was launched, neuroscientist Daphna Joel and psychologist and historian of science Cordelia Fine, both of whom are contributors to this special issue, published an editorial in the New York Times asserting that “recent research is making it clearer than ever that the notion that sex determines the fundamentals of brain structure and behavior is a misconception” (Joel and Fine 2018). In the editorial, Joel and Fine do not make a simple counterargument that sex does not have anything to do with brain structure and behavior. Instead, they advance more subtle and interesting points, such as the difference between group-level and individual-level phenomena. If several studies compare women’s and men’s personalities and behaviors and identify six different ways that women and men are, on average, different, people tend to think that means that any given woman will be somewhat more likely to show the “feminine” pattern for each of those six characteristics. In reality, at the individual level, most people show a mixture of traits that are more common in females and other traits that are more common in males. Differences at the group level do not translate into gendered “types” at the individual level. Therefore, the extant research reveals a much more complex picture than the one that proponents of “brain sex” disseminate. But how can readers who are not deeply engaged with this field make sense of the chasm between the perspectives that Joel and Fine offer, on the one hand, and those that the ASU project offers, on the other?
With this issue, we aim to help people make sense of such disputes. We hope to introduce readers across different levels of familiarity and comfort with science in general, and neuroscience in particular, to the key issues and contemporary debates in feminism and neuroscience. Most of the papers included here emerged from a March 2016 meeting of the NeuroGenderings Network, an international, transdisciplinary group of scholars “who aim to critically examine neuroscientific knowledge production” and seek to develop “a more gender adequate neuroscientific research.” The network was formed at a meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, in 2010, when roughly two dozen scholars from diverse disciplines answered a call issued by cultural studies scholar Isabelle Dussauge and cognitive neuroscientist and gender scholar Anelis Kaiser for a gathering where participants would “identify theoretical and methodological strategies for social scientists, cultural scientists and neuroscientists to engage with radical, intersectional feminist and queer studies of the brain.” That meeting was magical – many participants recall sitting in a room for the first time with people who really and truly had deep knowledge and methodological skills in both critical analysis of gender and in various aspects of empirical neuroscience. The group has become an important intellectual home for scholars scattered across the globe who straddle these two worlds.
Six years and three meetings later, Rebecca Jordan-Young, Gina Rippon, and Deboleena Roy co-organized NG4, which convened in March 2016 in New York. We chose the theme of “evidence” to recognize that one of the challenges of collaboration in the group – whose members span disciplines that include cognitive and developmental neuroscience, various branches of psychology, sociology, epidemiology, cultural studies, queer studies, science and technology studies, anthropology, history, philosophy, and more – is that members have radically different orientations towards data. Neurogenderings scholars broadly share the commitment to elaborate materially based understandings of the relations between gender and brains while challenging both biological determinism and heteronormative, reductivist frameworks of gender and sexuality. Some group members are primarily anchored in experimental work within a single discipline, others are primarily anchored in theoretical and synthetic analyses across disciplines, and others still are committed to producing original empirical research that will be both legible to and valued by colleagues in their disciplines, all while incorporating feminist and queer approaches to gender and sexuality.
Our meeting had three broad goals: to develop a structure for sustained support and learning, including mentoring a new generation of neurogenderings scholars; to develop new collaborations across disciplines and generations; and to jumpstart new collective projects. Based on shared interests, and with an eye to mixing both disciplines and also junior and senior scholars within each group, we assembled new working groups and, over the course of a weekend, generated draft abstracts for new projects.
Contributions to this Volume
Many of the eight papers in this special issue target the idea that women’s and men’s brains are essentially different and dimorphic, and that the variations between “female brains” and “male brains” explain variations in behavior and cognition. But beyond these commonalities lie significant internal debates, often concerning the best way to approach sex and gender as variables in neuroscience. These are real debates, to be sure, but they are not a matter of “scientific realists” versus “feminist idealists” or skeptics versus celebrators of sex/gender differences. Instead, they reflect the hard work of conducting empirical work that can hold its own within feminist and queer studies and neuroscience. Indeed, these debates should have a place in mainstream neuroscience, as they are about the operationalization of key variables. Deboleena Roy, one of the organizers of the meeting that launched these papers, has described her own research and scholarship as “attempts to make a shift from feminist critiques of science to the creation of feminist practices that can contribute to scientific inquiry in the lab.” A similar commitment to practical interventions is evident in all the papers.
In their paper “Feminist Interventions on the Sex/Gender Question in Neuroimaging Research,” Bryant, Grossi, and Kaiser take on these ideas in the field of neuroimaging. After they discuss empirical, statistical, and methodological problems with the reductivist brain sex view, they propose a series of feminist interventions to reduce bias in neuroimaging research. These interventions include reporting the degree of variability both between and within groups, documenting the degree of overlap between distributions, adopting techniques that minimize the risk of finding spurious differences between groups, and reporting null results. The authors provide an application of some of these interventions in their empirical investigation of sex/gender in major white matter tracts associated with language processing.
In “A Conversation Around the Integration of Sex and Gender When Modelling Aspects of Fear, Anxiety, and PTSD in Animals,” Gungor, Duchesne, and Bluhm address the recent National Health Institute policy to include female animals in preclinical neuroscience research. The policy, which aims to rectify the problem of taking male animals as proxy for both sexes, requires NIH-funded researchers to factor in sex as a biological variable in their research designs and analyses. For this reason, it has been seen by some as valuable (e.g., Shansky and Wooley 2016). In contrast, other scientists have cautioned about the unforeseen consequences of this requirement, such as the increase of false positive results, the reification of the idea of essential sex differences, and concerns that prioritizing differences over similarities may ultimately obscure knowledge about mechanisms related to sex-linked biology, gender, and development (e.g., Maney 2016; Springer et al. 2012; Rippon et al. 2017). Adopting a feminist perspective, Gungor et al.’s paper, structured as a conversation among the authors, explores the benefits and problems of using female animals focusing on animal models of fear, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition that affects more women than men in the western hemisphere. The authors see the inclusion of animals from both sexes in preclinical trials as valuable, as it would provide a more refined knowledge of the brain mechanisms that underlie negative emotional states and how biological systems work in general; in addition, knowing about sex differences might be valuable in terms of clinical intervention. However, they also warn against the possibility that sex differences in animals will be seen as “pure sex differences,” that is, differences that would exist between women and men if they had not been “contaminated” by the cultural factors that shape human life and experience. For this reason, the authors stress the importance of considering each species as having its own ecological niche and adaptations (and therefore caution against acritical cross-species comparisons), adopting a multidisciplinary approach to investigate how “gender-stratified and intersectional cultures” shape the clinical realities of women and men, and treating the existence of commonalities between female animals and women as an empirical question, not as an a priori given.
The issue of how to account for gender in sex/gender research is Shattuck-Heidorn and Richardson’s focus in “Sex/Gender and the Biosocial Turn” as well. The authors discuss how gender-related factors are often mentioned in biological sciences, but are rarely addressed or factored in, as has been done for other variables (for example, they review work on how differences in racial discrimination, poverty, and social inequality have been associated with differences in brain functioning, brain development, and health). They propose to expand the investigation of gender as a biosocial variable in biological sciences, with particular attention to adopting an intersectional approach (aimed at exploring the dynamic and complex interaction between gender and other biosocial variables, such as race) and a “relationally multidimensional perspective.” Such perspective recognizes the pervasiveness of gender in our lives and that gender is experienced by individuals at several different levels (e.g., diet), as a set of structural forces and patterns (e.g., prison), and a set of internal beliefs that shape how we think about and experience the world. The authors end with a call to action for feminist scientists in public health large data sets to explore novel hypotheses.
Three related papers, by Bentley, Kleinherenbrink, Rippon, Schellenberg, and Schmitz, focus on research on spatial processing. While behavioral sex differences are typically small and some have disappeared through time (Hyde 2014), spatial processing has often been hailed as persistent and as evidence for the biological nature of differences between the sexes. In the first paper, “Improving Practices for Investigating Spatial ‘Stuff’: Part I: Critical Gender Perspectives on Current Research Practices,” the authors rethink research on spatial cognition by adopting a feminist and gender-related social contexts perspective, focusing especially on the assumptions and biases present in the extant literature (e.g., essentialism). The expression they coin (“spatial stuff”) indicates their explicit intention to avoid a priori specifications of, and assumptions about, the nature of spatial cognition. Their critical review of spatial stuff literature elaborates on factors and issues that affect research in the field in terms of design and implementation (e.g., development, experiences, strategies, stereotype threat, and brain plasticity).
In line with the commitment to use feminist practices to contribute to scientific inquiries, the spatial stuff working group wanted to see how far they could push their interdisciplinary explorations of empirical research towards the development of an actual research protocol that would be gender-sensitive and thoroughly grounded in awareness of the importance of social context. In their second paper, “Improving Practices for Investigating Spatial ‘Stuff’: Part II: Considerations from Critical NeuroGenderings Perspectives,” they therefore aim to produce a research protocol to answer the concerns identified in the first paper. The authors’ attempts to elaborate the protocol generated deeper and deeper conversations regarding conceptual and methodological considerations and contradictions that emerge when designing a feminist neuroscience study, the many decisions that must be made, and the advantages and drawbacks of various choices. Rather than submerge these discussions to drive their group to consensus on a specific research protocol, they document their conversations. The result highlights areas of consensus and dissensus and reflects the authors’ heterogeneous disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, as well as ethical and social concerns.
A third paper from the spatial stuff working group, “Plasticity and Spatial Stuff under Western Neoliberal Order,” is a commentary on the politics of emphasizing plasticity in spatial cognition. Kleinherenbrink, Bentley, and Schmitz reflect on how neurodiscourse is always embedded in a social context in which scientific findings are interpreted to fit ideological purposes, and thus generate unforeseen dynamics. For example, instead of prompting policy changes that target social inequalities (such as increasing access to STEM fields for those who are currently underrepresented), the conversation on the plasticity of spatial cognition has often been framed by neoliberal views as a matter of individual responsibility. In addition, the concept of brain plasticity does not necessarily negate the view that sex/gender differences are essential and biologically determined: within a neoliberal perspective, “the brain is often taken as biologically determined in its past, but plastically open to its future.” As Kleinherenbrink (2016) discusses elsewhere, proponents of single-sex education have promoted a view of “sex differences in plasticity” and suggest that their programs can optimize each child’s future potential based on their original brain type (that is, female or male). As a scientific fact, brain plasticity has not forced a re-evaluation of the assumptions behind essentialist frameworks; instead, its meaning has been reworked to create a narrative that coexists with essentialisms.
Another paper on plasticity, “Plasticidad, Plasticidad, Plasticidad … y la Rigidez del Problema del Sexo,” by Fine, Jordan-Young, Kaiser, and Rippon, addresses the contradiction in contemporary neuroscience between widespread recognition of neural plasticity, on the one hand, and continuing treatment of sex/gender as fixed, on the other. This article originally appeared in English in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2013 (Fine et al. 2013). In 2018, Beatriz Félix Canseco of Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas, Mexico, approached the authors for permission to translate the article for her students. In keeping with the NeuroGendering Network’s commitment to diversifying the network of scholars and extending the reach of feminist neuroscience, we asked her if we could include the Spanish translation in this special issue and she graciously agreed.
In their piece “Eight Things You Need to Know about Sex, Gender, Brains, and Behavior: A Guide for Academics, Journalists, Parents, Gender Diversity Advocates, Social Justice Warriors, Tweeters, Facebookers, and Everyone Else Not Otherwise Specified,” Fine, Joel, and Rippon provide a vademecum for readers of sex differences literature who do not have a background to evaluate it critically. The authors guide the reader through methodological and statistical considerations (e.g., false positives, correction for brain size when we compare the volume of the brain or brain regions across individuals, the size of the difference) and interpretation issues (e.g., origin and meaning of a difference between two sets of data, comparison with findings in other animals, comparison with other data from the literature, interpretation of differences based on evolutionary pressure). In their words: “These eight things to know should assist anyone interested in making sense of findings from this complex and often-contested field of research, or their popular (mis)representation.”
In the NG4 meeting that launched these papers, we discussed the whack-a-mole problem: critical analysis may knock down particular flawed studies and unsupported claims only to have two more such studies pop up. One of the issues we identified was that our own analyses get very little play compared to research that reiterates expected sex/gender dimorphisms and essentialist frames. To make a dent in the status quo, our analyses must be even more accessible than the essentialist approach to sex/gender in neuroscience that has, for too long, sustained stereotypical and biological determinist beliefs, with wide-reaching social and cultural consequences. Essentialist models are enthusiastically popularized in part because are easy to comprehend, as they fit folk models of sex/gender so neatly. Unless we, as feminist scholars and scientists, can disseminate our own work beyond the realms of academic outlets, our aim to dismantle firmly entrenched but misguided beliefs will make only limited headway.
Part of our aim with this special issue was therefore to identify for nonscientists that sex/gender research is a work in progress, that today’s certainties can become tomorrow’s revisited hypotheses. Each of the papers offers a perspective on this, be it on the consequences of widening the remit of research by including a social context (Shattuck-Heidorn and Richardson and the spatial stuff papers) or on the assumptions behind the use of animal models (Gungor et al.) or the choice of data analysis techniques (Bryant et al.). The two pieces by Fine at al. address our goals of wide dissemination, one by reaching beyond English-speaking audiences and the other by identifying strategies for those outside academic communities so that they, too, can bring a critical perspective to research outcomes that have such an impact on everyday lives.
Objectivity, Authority, and Feminist Politics
Though some neuroscientists may bristle at critical analysis of claims about sex/gender and brains, the critiques are often received even more poorly by the general public and mainstream media. A public engagement talk by one of us on “Unsexing the Brain” was described as “smacking of feminism with an equality fetish” (an intriguing idea that an equal opportunities campaign might be somehow kinky). Similarly, our work has been described as “full of carp” – presumably not an observation on our fish-eating practices (Rippon 2019). Indeed, even some of the blind peer reviews for the papers in this issue warned the authors to stay away from the term “feminist,” apparently fearing that it undermined their arguments. (The peer reviews were nevertheless extremely helpful.) The uneasiness with the term “feminist” underscores that in the mainstream, being identified as a feminist disqualifies you from being recognized as a scientist and holding scientific authority. We see this entire special issue as a repudiation of that view, and an extension of the work that feminist scientists have been doing for decades towards realizing the goal of using feminist insights to create more accurate and beneficial scientific knowledge.
We are honored to bring these papers to Scholar & Feminist Online because here we can celebrate, rather than justify, our commitments to rigorous inclusion of insights from radical, intersectional, queer, and feminist theory to advance understandings of sex/gender and the brain. Too often, when we bring feminist and queer theory into empirical research practices and synthetic analyses of studies on sex/gender and the brain, we immediately lose authority. Regardless of our scientific training and credentials, and regardless of our commitments to empirical evidence and scientific methods (clearly evident in the papers in this issue and in our scholarly work), we sometimes have been characterized in the press or by other scientists as political, biased, or unqualified, all of which are read as the opposite of scientific and are contrasted to the unmarked and therefore presumably apolitical, unbiased, and expert “scientists” whose work we scrutinize. We are further perceived as undermining scientific research by critiquing specific studies or common research practices, though careful scrutiny and constant correction is supposed to be a core value of science (see, e.g., Baron-Cohen 2010; Cahill 2014). As Fine and Jordan-Young (2017) observe, “These charges would only make sense in a world without shades of grey, in which neurobiological investigation of sex – from basic cellular neuroscience to social neuroscience – is either good or bad. In this worldview, if you’re ‘for’ investigations of sex influences, you will never criticize any of it, ever: otherwise, you’re ‘against’ it.”
In that same vein, we have also sometimes been mischaracterized as “anti-sex difference,” with the accusers assuming that we believe equality is incompatible with differences. But we well know that feminist and queer politics do not neatly track along advocates of “similarity” or “difference.” History is full of examples of feminist and queer campaigns that have been built on passionate claims of essential differences as well as others that have just as fervently argued for similarities: while François Poullain de la Barre famously averred that “the mind has no sex,” one branch of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suffragists argued for extending the vote to women because women were different from men and their special maternal sensitivities would improve national policy and character (Schiebinger 1989; Prescott 2014). There are no arguments “for” or “against” difference in the approaches on display in this issue. Instead, there is concern that the degree and specific nature of differences are carefully explained rather than assumed or casually lumped as “dimorphisms,” and that similarities are traced as diligently as are differences.
Philosopher Sandra Harding (1996) asked long ago, “How should one explain the surprising fact that politically guided research projects have been able to produce less partial and distorted results of research than those supposedly guided by the goal of value-neutrality?” As Harding, Donna Haraway, Helen Longino, and dozens of other feminist philosophers and science historians amply demonstrate, science is an irreducibly social enterprise, and the goal is not to scrub the social content out of science (as if that were possible), but to use the awareness of science’s situatedness to bring deeper levels of reflection about the context of our work, the social resonance of the questions we ask and the metaphors we employ, and the blind spots that our cultural habits encourage in research. We dedicate this issue to our feminist foremothers, especially those scientists and philosophers who have insisted, like Harding, on the value of “real knowledge that is socially situated.”
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