Neurofeminism Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory

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2013 23: 569Feminism & PsychologyDafne Muntanyola Saura

Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom (eds)scienceNeurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive

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prompt discussion among students in social work or mental health practitioner

programs. One of the most useful aspects of this section isthe ethics of resistance,

which serves as a call to action for all psychologists to be continuously vigilant to

the organizational and societal pressures affecting their work.

In summary, Magnusson and Marecek have created an excellent resource for

psychologists seeking to incorporate gender and culture into their understanding of

psychology. They inspire readers to rethink the importance of the social context

culture in peoples experiences. Students will gain both conceptual and methodo-

logical insights from the accessible and engaging chapters.

Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom (eds), Neurofeminism: Issues at the

intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2012; 296 pp.ISBN 978-0-230-29673-2.

Reviewed by: Dafne Muntanyola Saura, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain

Are we looking at a re-feminization of neuroscience? The inclusion of neurobiolo-

gist Kay Tye in Natures last Women in Science volume (30 Something Science

March 2013) seems to point in this direction. Being one of the hottest fields in

science, looking closer into the scientific kitchen might gives us key insights into the

relationship between doing gender and doing science. A key guide to this process is

Neurofeminism, a collection of 11 essays on the critical relationship between fem-inist theory and neuroscience. The authors, including the editors of the volume

Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom, come from the

disciplines of Philosophy, Psychology and Women Studies, with some being neuro-

scientists, biologists and engineers. The essays are not divided into sections but

gather around key themes such as terminology, ethics, philosophy of science and

embodiment. The heterogeneity of topics and authors makes it a difficult read at

times, and reiterations are inevitable. Rather than going through the essays from

A to Z, readers will probably pick the authors they want to read selectively, just

like reading poetry. The bibliography, which has been merged at the end of thebook, is up to date and of extreme value for students and academics who wish to

understand the state of the art of feminist cognitive science.

Neuroscience is firmly based on naturalistic research methods such as psycho-

logical experimentation, brain imaging and stimulation (EEG, MEG, fMRI, TMS)

and mathematical modelling. As Letitia Meynell puts forward in The Politics of

Pictured Reality, fMRI and other tools such as 3D foetal ultrasound produce

images that are onlyapparentlytransparent. Scientists rely heavily on sophisticated

machinery for observation and analysis that shape the production of results. The

adoration of the image impregnated already the birth of photography as an artisticdiscipline, as well as that of film. The historical confrontation between the realistic

and the fantastic use of media traditionally downplays the need for artificiality in

taking the picture, independently of the content of the final object. The current

manifestation of this cultural desire of visualizing anything is called in this volume

Book reviews 569

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3/5

neuro-voyeurism (p. 141), applied specifically to the need for images of the brain.

In the laboratory, the aura of technology implies epistemic authority, which is also

socially constructed. While fMR images are visually attractive, they represent two

objects, the female brain and the male brain, that do not exist as physical realities

outside the world of statistical averages.

Following Meynell, Variation is noise (p. 15), and thus Ginger Goffmans

Neurosciences and Gender Differences shows how basic axioms of statistics are

not taken into account. She presents a study published in Cognitive Science

(Price and Friston, 2002) that illustrates how variation among individual brains

is higher than differences between grouped female/male brains, which makes

gender an irrelevant discrimination factor from the statistical point of view. The

small number of subjects who are the basis for such fMRI studies make results

unreliable, according to representativity based on sample size. Goffman decon-

structs the claim that there is enough neuro-data to prove the existence of perman-ent, innate and hard-wired gender differences. In fact, the high plasticity of the

brain and the importance of environmental factors counterbalance the most

common myths in neuroscience journals. Numerous examples in psychology and

cognitive science, such as Hyde (2005) in this volume and Kirsh and Maglio (1995)

show how cognitive skills improve with practice. Expert video players increase their

mental rotation abilities through embodied interactions with their environment,

regardless of gender. They are successful in the refinement of their epistemic

actions. As for hardwiring, as Rebecca Jordan-Young and Raffaella Rumiati put

forward later in this volume, it constitutes an unethical metaphor because it sayswhat is, it must be (p. 115), an attitude that translates the psychological need for

an organized environment and social order rather than the construction of a good

research question. Here we see how the feminist model takes into account the moral

and social dimension of doing science, which is a standpoint that is not part of

mainstream neuroscience. Several contributions point to the fact that the peer-

review system favours the publication of experimental results showing differences

rather than gender similarities in brain behaviour. The dynamics of peer reviewing

might as well take part in the choice of method.

Moreover, as social scientists learn early in their career, correlations are notcausal relations. If data extracted from Facebook statuses by African-American

teenagers who declare a sexual preference for men also like basketball, what does

this correlation say about race, sexuality and sports? Looking at these data, noth-

ing relevant is being said, despite the fact that the empirical object has been widely

constructed and distributed on the web as Big Data results. Current developments

of big data science should make us hyperaware of the danger of believing in juxta-

position of information as the basis for real knowledge. Isabelle Dussage and

Anelis Kaiser label the jump of mainstream neuroscience from structure to func-

tion a product of reification. An example of an old-fashioned case of neuroscienceis that of brain-organization theory, where pre-natal sex dimorphism is taken as

evidence for differences in later gendered behaviour. As defined by Pylyshyn (2003),

reification amounts to taking an event type (such as differences in hormone expos-

ure in the womb) as an event token (differences in individual gender behaviour).

570 Feminism & Psychology 23(4)



4/5

Hardwired determinism is a direct consequence of this type of scholastic fallacy,

which happens in other domains in cognitive science, such as in analytical ration-

ality, where Cartesian dualism is the rule. Vidal (2009) quoted by Dussage and

Kaiser uses the term brainhood to label the ideology that equates brain and self,

subjectivity with neurons. The dominant brain organization paradigm follows this

social reductionism.

Following a similar epistemic road, Deboleena Roy moves from the context of

discovery to that of justification. She discusses the politics of representation from

an intersubjective point of view. Roy proposes slowing down as scientists and

looking for alternatives that would put to use old tools and designs together

with new research questions. These same authors look into task-based experiments,

such as Baron Cohens (2005) where the choice of toys or games that the partici-

pants are asked to play with respond to the researchers gender attributions of what

is considered feminine or masculine. The toddlers preference for dolls was con-sidered feminine, while choosing construction sets was considered as a masculine

attitude. In all, social constructs derived from the researchers tools, stereotypes

and experimental designs permeate neuroscience laboratories.

I believe Gillian Einsteins account of her research on Female Genital Cutting

(FGC) escapes common reification and is a brilliant alternative to mainstream

neuroscience. By establishing an interdisciplinary object and combining tools

from the social sciences and neuroscience, she re-defines her object of research

and opens new directions for neuroscience itself. Her deconstruction starts by

breaking the traditional view of biology as being about something frozen andstructured: Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life

(Medawar, p. 149). The paradigm shift is again from a reified view of the reality

of neurons to the more complete and interdisciplinary view of variation in individ-

ual and social behaviour. By doing situated neuroscience, that is, by combining the

subjective accounts of Somali women who have gone through FGC, with objective

physical examinations of the genital area, she comes up with the idea that a possible

neurological outcome of FGC is a phantom clitoris. She thus puts forward how no

one has actually mapped female body regions to areas in the brain. Her questions

are not restricted to the amputation itself but include the chronic experiences ofpain, body mobility and skin oversensitivity, since the world writes on the whole

body. Her research demands a new understanding of the concept of pain, a bodily

sensation with strong narrative and social grounds.

When authors from pop neuroscience picture women as unique brain-body-

behaviour systems, they are ignoring the social nature of the embodied mind. It

is at the level of the social system that women and men negotiate work family

balance in their everyday lives, through work, pleasure, love and creativity.

Feminist neuroscience counters pop neuroscience, which is how Robyn Bluhm

names the best sellers that locate womens agency in a brain that is separatefrom the body. Another example is Naomi Wolfs last book, which locates the

female agency in a particular genital area, the vagina. By naturalizing gender

stereotypes and reducing gender issues to communication conflicts (such as in

Why Men Dont Listen and Women Cant Read Maps), gender inequality becomes

Book reviews 571



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less political, as Cynthia Krauss puts forward. The responsibility for changing

discrimination against women at work, or unfair domestic share of household

tasks, falls into the hands of women who have to deal with essentially different

and problematic biological equipment.

Popular narratives on womens identities counter the contemporary cognitive

science take on how we think. Cognition never happens in isolation and it is always

interactive. The body, in the words of Andy Clark, is the locus of willed action, the

point of sensory-motor confluence, the gateway to intelligent offloading (2008, p.

207). Human cognition is not the innate, monolithic, deterministic, genetic and

individual process that mainstream neuroscience and pop neuroscience seem to

picture. As claimed in the introduction to this volume The social nature of the

embodied mind starts early and perhaps even precedes birth (p. 8). The brain is a

plastic, situated and flexible organic entity that interacts constantly with the phys-

ical, cultural and social environment. Most importantly, and here is where soci-ology, anthropology, social psychology and other disciplines that are not part of

this volume could contribute, these changes happen not only at the biological or

the psychological level but also at the social level. The outcome of my reading is

that variation, in science as well as in gender, is here to stay.

Christine Horrocks and Sally Johnson (eds), Advances in health psychology critical approaches.

Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012; 230 pp. ISBN 9780230275386 (pbk)

Reviewed by: Carmel Capewell, The University of Northampton, UK

The focus of this book is looking at how critical health psychology can lead to

action and, with it, social change. The contributors all have an interest in health,

mainly using qualitative methods in participative and community projects with

marginalised groups. Some take an explicitly feminist perspective in their research.

Moving away from the traditional bio-psychological model of health psychology,

the book emphasises the scholar-activist role enabling a focus on social and con-

textual issues. The critical approaches in health psychology incorporate the contextin which individuals live their lives and the impact this has on health behaviour.

This is in contrast with the traditional health psychology approach which decon-

texualises individual health behaviours and cognition.

Most of contributions to the book emerge from the British Healthcare System

(NHS). The book is arranged in four sections. In Part I, contributors provide

background on the development and value of critical health psychology.

The authors do not deny the place and worth of traditional health psychology

but do advance the benefits of an alternative approach. Part II explores in more

detail the interactions between individual health decisions and actions throughexploring the social, cultural, gender and situational contexts within which such

decisions take place. Detailed consideration is given to how people need to be

situated in a wider context if health behaviours and responses to health prevention

campaigns are to be of use. Participants voices provide clear examples of the

572 Feminism & Psychology 23(4)


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Neurofeminism Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory