S. Schmitz, G. Höppner, editors: "Gendered Neurocultures" c Zaglossus eU

Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Hรถppner, editors

Gendered Neurocultures Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses

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challenge GENDER Contemporary challenges of_within Gender Theory.

Series edited by the Gender Research Office Volume 2 This series edited by the Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna presents contemporary theories, discourses, and research within the field of transdisciplinary Gender Studies, including Feminist Epistemology, Queer Theory, Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Science Studies, Gender & Science Technology Studies.

Central to the series are critical approaches to gender relations and other power structures in the context of globalization. Moreover, “Challenge Gender� presents analytical works that reflect changes over time, and attempt to think sex, gender, and sexuality in new ways.

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Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Hรถppner, editors

Gendered Neurocultures Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Current Brain Discourses

zaglossus

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Supported by the City of Vienna—Cultural Department, Science and Research Promotion, by the Austrian National Union of Students, by the Austrian Students’ Union at the University of Vienna, and by the Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna.

Cordelia Fine’s “Explaining, or Sustaining, the Status Quo? The Potentially SelfFulfilling Effects of ‘Hardwired’ Accounts of Sex Differences” was originally published with the same title in the Springer journal Neuroethics, Vol. 5, 2012, pp. 285–294. With kind permission from Springer Science and Business Media.

A slightly modified German-language version of Grit Höppner and Sigrid Schmitz’s “Neuroenhancement and Success: A Gendered Rereading of Popular Media” was first published as “Erfolgreich optimiert? Das neuropharmakologische Optimierungsparadigma und dessen geschlechtliche Implikationen,” in GENDER. Zeitschrift für Geschlecht, Kultur und Gesellschaft, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2013, pp. 39–55.

We thank the publishers for the kind permission to integrate and reprint parts of the original paper.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © Zaglossus e. U., Vienna, 2014 All rights reserved Copy editors: C. Joanna Sheldon, Nicole Alecu de Flers Logo “NeuroCultures—NeuroGenderings II” by Gabi Damm Print: Prime Rate Kft., Budapest Printed in Hungary ISBN 978-3-902902-12-2 Zaglossus e. U. Vereinsgasse 33/25, 1020 Vienna, Austria E-Mail: info@zaglossus.eu www.zaglossus.eu

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Contents

Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Hรถppner Catching the Brain Today: From Neurofeminism to Gendered Neurocultures

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Improving Neuroscience Neurofeminist Empirical Critique and Approaches for a More Gender-Adequate Research Anelis Kaiser On the (Im)Possibility of a Feminist and Queer Neuroexperiment

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Isabelle Dussauge Brains, Sex, and Queers 2090: An Ideal Experiment

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Hannah Fitsch What Goes Around Comes Around: Visual Knowledge in fMRI and Its Implications for Research Practice

Emily Ngubia Kuria Theorizing Race(ism) While NeuroGendering

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Reframing Neuro-Epistemologies Heidi Maibom and Robyn Bluhm A Situationist Account of Sex/Gender Differences: Implications for Neuroimaging Research

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Cordelia Fine Explaining, or Sustaining, the Status Quo? The Potentially Self-Fulfilling Effects of ‘Hardwired’ Accounts of Sex Differences

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Daphna Joel Sex, Gender, and Brain: A Problem of Conceptualization

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Victoria Pitts-Taylor The Mind in the Body: Feminist and Neurocognitive Perspectives on Embodiment

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Deboleena Roy Developing a New Political Ecology: Neuroscience, Feminism, and the Case of the Estrogen Receptor

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Questioning Neurocultures Concepts, Contexts, Consequences Svenja Matusall Social Neuroscience: Gendering Sociality or Socializing Gender?

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Odile Fillod Oxytocin as Proximal Cause of ‘Maternal Instinct’: Weak Science, Post-Feminism, and the Hormones Mystique

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Christel Gumy The Gendered Tools of the Construction of a Unisex ‘Adolescent Brain’

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Grit Höppner and Sigrid Schmitz Neuroenhancement and Success: A Gendered Rereading of Popular Media

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Karen O’Connell Bad Boys’ Brains: Law, Neuroscience, and the Gender of ‘Aggressive’ Behavior

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Improving Neuro-Knowledge Approaches to Gender-Sensitive Neuro-Pedagogies Catherine Vidal Neuro-Pedagogy of the Gender Theory

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Kristina Mead Vetter The Creation of a Feminist Classroom and Science Lab Environment in the Interdisciplinary Biology and Women’s Studies Course: Sex, Gender, and the Brain

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Edyta Just Computing and Affective Body-Brain: A Critically-Creative Reflection on Affect

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Outlook Rebecca M. Jordan-Young Fragments for the Future: Tensions and New Directions from “NeuroCultures—NeuroGenderings II”

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Notes on Contributors

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Sigrid Schmitz and Grit Höppner

Catching the Brain Today: From Neurofeminism to Gendered Neurocultures

Preliminary Remarks Introducing an anthology is somehow like narrating a story.

Feminist studies have elaborated a long-standing critique of such storytellings to the degree that they present a history of science and its actors. In this introduction, we aim to account for such a problematic journey in two ways. We will present more a ‘herstory’ than a ‘history’ in referencing the wide scope of literature of colleagues who have worked on neurosciences and their gendered impacts. And we try to walk this landscape using time and spatial loops, attempting to connect several perspectives and linking them together. A written text unavoidably produces narrative structures. We can only try to break these structures by incorporating some loops, open spaces, and uncertainties.

According to gender research and to feminist science studies in particular, sex is not a pure bodily or material fact but is deeply interwoven with social and cultural constructions (Fausto-Sterling 2012). Following this concept, the term sex/gender (firstly set up by Kaiser et al. [2009] for this context) is used throughout this introduction deliberately to emphasize the inextricable entanglements in such a bio-cultural approach. We appreciate that several authors in this volume also used this term in similar contexts. In this volume, we refer to this notion and introduce further concepts of gender, feminist, and queer scholarly work that are groundbreaking for the analyses and debates on neuroscientific 9

research and contemporary neurocultural developments. We decided to highlight these concepts in italics. We further decided to put all those terms in single quotation marks that—in our view— embed constructive meanings, although these terms may be used in scientific and popular debates as ‘facts.’ This format may irritate the reader, but this irritation is deliberate.

In March 2010, the Center for Gender Research at Uppsala University, and Isabelle Dussauge and Anelis Kaiser in particular, launched the first international and transdisciplinary conference on NeuroGenderings. This conference was funded by the Swedish Research Council in the excellence program GenNa: Nature/ Culture and Transgressive Encounters, and by the Body/Embodiment Group1 at the Center for Gender Research. At this meeting the NeuroGenderings Network was initiated, an expert group devoted to the critical examination of research on the sexed brain: Isabelle Dussauge (Linköping University), Cordelia Fine (University of Melbourne), Hannah Fitsch (Technical University Berlin), Katarina Hamberg (Umeå University), Rebecca Jordan-Young (Columbia University), Anelis Kaiser (University of Bern), Cynthia Kraus (Lausanne University), Emily Ngubia Kuria (Charité Berlin), Katrin Nikoleyczik (University of Freiburg), Deboleena Roy (Emory University), Raffaela Rumiati (International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste), Sigrid Schmitz (University of Vienna), and Catherine Vidal (Institute Pasteur Paris).

These scholars from Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia work in different disciplines in the field of gender and brain research, such as the neurosciences, the humanities, social and cultural studies, gender and queer studies, feminist science studies, and science technology studies. They all work to improve reflective analysis within and of the neurosciences and to initiate dialogue across disciplinary borders. They aim to evaluate the current state of neuroscientific methods, evidence, and interpretations regarding sex/gender in the brain; to elaborate innovative theoretical and empirical approaches that could address the question of sex/gender and other intersected categories in a more adequate manner in brain research; to discuss the impacts of neuroscientific 10

gender research in socio-political and cultural fields; to analyze the social and political underpinnings of the ongoing cerebralization of human life and especially of gender in current neurocultures; and to develop concepts for moving beyond critical and reflective debates in education and social discourse (an approach which we name neuro-pedagogies in this anthology). The first sample of the approaches of this expert group can already be read in a special issue of the journal Neuroethics, entitled “Neuroethics and Gender” (Dussauge & Kaiser 2012b).

The NeuroGenderings Network grew after the second conference of the group, on the topic “NeuroCultures—NeuroGenderings II,” which was held at the University of Vienna, in cooperation with the university’s Gender Research Office and the Gender Studies Chair, from September 13–15, 2012.2 This conference was organized along both thematic sessions encompassing talks and discussions and a session for poster presentations of junior scholars, which was combined with an expert discussion. We use a similar structuring in this volume (see below) to present the results of the NeuroGenderings II conference. Most of the papers are based on the conference presentations and the session discussions, along with further elaborations of the NeuroGenderings Network.

In fact, this expert group is in itself not homogeneous, neither in its disciplinary connection to this field nor in its perspective on neuroscience and current neurocultures or concerning the theoretical assumptions and conclusions. In consequence, ‘our’ knowledge production (as all scientific knowledge productions) has some common lines, whereas being controversial in others (Kraus 2012b). The Vienna conference highlighted the different standpoints in the debate, and the discussion will proceed in spring 2014 at the NeuroGenderings III conference in Lausanne (Switzerland), organized by Cynthia Kraus and Anelis Kaiser.

Rebecca Jordan-Young will conclude this volume with her outlook on the ‘dissensus’ questions that are in the center of our work to date, and that are—in the view of the NeuroGenderings Network—important and necessary to discuss and research in times 11

of powerful recourses to “the neuro,” both in scholarly and public discourse, for legitimizing policies and social practices and for normalizing gendered cultural orders.

Wandering through Neuro-Landscapes: Concepts, Knowledge Productions, and Reflective Approaches As a leading scientific field, neuroscience is currently a key area of research on the question of what constitutes the ‘human.‘ With its modern methods of brain imaging and thus the apparent ability to see into the living brain at work, structures and activity networks appear to be precisely localizable; behavior, thinking, and acting are often understood as being explainable and even predictable from these biological materialities.

The basic assumption that there are two sexes is the premise for creating a difference-oriented method in brain research, through which each group is assumed to be inherently homogenous. However, the outcome of research on differences between women and men in terms of linguistic abilities, spatial orientation, or mathematics—that is, of cognitive capacities in general—is by no means conclusive (Coluccia & Louse 2004; Else-Quest et al. 2010; Fausto-Sterling et al. 2012a, 2012b; Hyde & Linn 2006; Lavenex & Lavenex 2010; Mehl et al. 2007; Schmitz 1999; Spelke 2005); neither are results on emotional or rational processes (Karafyllis 2008), nor the state of the art on sexual orientation (for an overview see Dussauge & Kaiser 2012a). Janet Hyde emphasized more behavioral similarities than differences between women and men in a meta-analytic review (Hyde 2005). Not only on the behavioral and performance level but also concerning their apparently biomaterial sources, that is, the brain networks and their functions, research reviews and elaborates inconsistent findings concerning differences between women and men, similarities between or variations within these groups (Blanch et al. 2004; Bluhm et al. 2012; Frost et al. 1999; Jordan-Young 2010; JordanYoung & Rumiati 2012; Kuria 2012; Roy 2012; Sommer et al. 2004; 12

Sommer et al. 2008; Ulshöfer 2008; C. Vidal 2012; Wallentin 2009).

All these approaches also started to question the border between sex and gender (see also Dussauge; Kaiser; Maibom & Bluhm; and Roy in this volume) and led to the use of the term sex/gender.

Recent intersectional analyses enter the debate, which show the entanglements of categories in these fields, for example, when racism and ageism are connected with gender (see Gumy; Kuria; and O’Connell in this volume).

Differentiated analyses that systematically investigate methodical influences on the neuroscientific knowledge production in sex/gender research have uncovered variations in data selection, statistical analysis, and computer tomographic calculations that speak against generalizations over the scope of the studies (Bishop & Wahlstein 1997; Fine 2013; Kaiser et al. 2009; Schmitz 2010). The fact that these meta-studies have been included in scholarly neuroscience journals attests an increasing sensitization towards critical reflections on methods within this field of research, but even to date studies that establish differences between the genders are published more often than studies that do not (Fine 2013; Kaiser 2012). In consequence, ‘publication biases’ still manifest notions of a binary gender order and seemingly biologically determined gendered significations, in particular when it comes to the transgression of ‘scientific knowledge’ into public discourse via popular media (see Fillod; Höppner & Schmitz; Just; Matusall; O’Connell; and Vidal in this volume).

Brain images of brilliantly colored activation areas present local distinctions and precise areas of processing in line with behavioral and cognitive performances. These visualizations are often taken as evidence of what is in (or out of ) the brain (McCabe & Castel 2008), thus serving a metaphoric concept of science that proposes to discover and represent ‘nature‘ as it is. Nevertheless, neuroscientists are well aware of the constructive nature of these images (Beaulieu 2001, 2002; Joyce 2005), which are by no means direct portrayals of the interior of the brain,—as well as they are aware of the mutual biases in neuroscientific research (Henrich et al. 2010; Vul et al. 2009). Brain images that are presented in 13

scientific papers include the decisions made by researchers and research groups to construct an image, depending, for example, on the theoretical approach of the analysis as well as on the applied methods during the experiment, on processes of negotiation within a lab, on the aims of a research, or on the conscious and unconscious understandings and beliefs of researchers, to name only a few intervening factors. Thus the transformation from corporeal matter to non-corporeal data and conversion back to an image of a brain’s matter (Schmitz 2003) is certainly not unprecedented and—in terms of laboratory studies—particular “inscriptions” (Latour & Woolgar 1979) go in line with these constructive processes of brain imaging.These analyses hold for the gendering of brain images, which also always depends on the context and decisions in which they are produced, and which can result in apparent gender differences or a lack of those differences in images of the same experimental group (Kaiser et al.

2007; see also Fitsch 2012; Fitsch in this volume; Maibom & Bluhm in this volume; Nikoleyczik 2012).

However, this does not mean that knowledge of the brain that has been gained through image technology is random or inapplicable. On the contrary, especially within the medical field, ways of constructing knowledge through specialized procedures are useful for different diagnostic fields, therapy, or neurosurgery.

Nevertheless, these brain-imaging procedures are still constructions for particular functions, highlighting the one brain area or the other vessel structure, subtracting this from that activity, and in such they cover the common activities that may be necessary for solving both tasks. Moreover, the use of brain images becomes problematic if they are used out of context in order to make generalizing statements about predefined groups based on gender, age, ethnicity, or other universalized categories (see Gumy; Kaiser; and Kuria in this volume).

It is also problematic if these images are used in popular science to transport simplified statements about group differences and behavioral predictions about these homogenized groups (e. g., Cahill 2005; see Fillod in this volume; Matusall in this volume), if 14

apparent biological explanations are taken for granted and are transformed into the public to confirm seemingly determining sex differences (irrespective of whether gender differences are constituted in gendered societal orders or not, see Jordan-Young at the end of this volume), or if the latest scientific research is referenced to serve the legitimization of social hierarchies as well as social inclusions and exclusions (see Höppner & Schmitz; O’Connell in this volume). Critical gender, feminist, and queer scholars have developed a term for all these not reflected biases in research, public perception, and for their societal impacts on individual, structural, and symbolic levels: neurosexism (Fine 2010). There is outstanding scholarly work that has been presenting results on such biases in neuroscientific research for more than three decades now. In speaking against neurosexism the term neurofeminism was presented to cover such approaches and to call for critical research (Bluhm et al. 2012).

In order to present this volume in more detail, it is necessary to do a loop by highlighting an often used concept in the neuroscientific discourse and by considering its consequences. A more differentiated understanding of sex/gender and the brain has been developed under the perspective of plasticity concepts in the neurosciences, which indeed have already a more than fiftyyear history since the first notions of structural changes in synaptic connections in animal studies in the 1960s (Rosenzweig et al.

1962). Today, brain plasticity studies in humans address the development of different language networks and brain functionalities as results of individual language biographies (Bloch et al. 2009), or changes in spatial and motoric areas due to navigation experience in the long run (Maguire et al. 2000), and even of structural changes in the corpus callosum (e. g., Gaser & Schlaug 2003) or as results of shorter periods of learning juggling (Draganski et al. 2004). Plasticity concepts have therefore led to a redefinition of cause and effect in “neuro-argumentations” as the biological system of the brain is extremely open and able to adapt diverse influences over the course of a lifetime. Using this constructivist 15

perspective, the brain cannot be characterized as solely physical matter and as the only essence of behavior. It has to be analyzed accounting for its continuous entanglements within the outer world. That is, culture acts on behavior by forming and shaping the biology of the brain: This is the virus with which neurofeminism has inoculated neuroscientific discourse during the last decade (Jordan-Young & Rumiati 2012; Schmitz 2010; C. Vidal 2012).

Accordingly, brain images are snapshots of a certain moment of physical materiality, which is always connected to individual biographies. Results of brain scans thus cannot provide information on the processes that had led to these developments, neither in nature nor in culture. Despite this obvious critique, the “snapshot approach” (Schmitz 2010) is used uncritically instead of plasticity considerations in the interpretation of results, even in recent sex/gender-related brain imaging studies, as Cordelia Fine has analyzed (Fine 2013).

Neurofeminist analyses also investigate the stereotype thread and its consequences; that is, the impact of the overtaking of gendered stereotypes on the own cognitive performance, behavior, and even on neuronal processing (Massa et al. 2005; Spencer et al. 1999; for an overview see also Fine 2010).

Taken together, neurofeminism has developed a theoretical and methodological agenda to critically research the neuroscientific knowledge production against neurosexisms. Differentiated analyses, as convened in this anthology, help to foreground diversities and dynamic processes in place of binary gender categories.

Scholars in neurofeminism, however, aim for more. They aim to develop a better approach to neuroscientific research—in other words, they aim to improve neuroscience (see Dussauge; Fitsch; Kaiser; and Kuria in this volume).

However, in narrating plasticity stories, scholars in gender and brain research mostly presented only a return of genealogies of cause and effect, arguing that social experiences and power relations impact the brain’s structure and function. This use of the brain plasticity concept is important to deconstruct unilinear 16

statements of apparently biological determination of behavior, attitudes, etc. The use of the brain plasticity concept—albeit extremely useful for pointing out the inscription and embodiment of individual experiences, societal structures, and cultural norms—also challenges neurofeminist discourse in two ways.

Firstly, do brain plasticity analyses only follow an account that refers to the discursive forming of materiality and thus emphasizes the meaning-making processes inscribed in the brain but leaves its agency out of focus? In plasticity concepts the materiality of the brain remains to be framed as a more or less passive reactor to the attribution of gendered (and intersected) significations. Instead, in the perspective of a feminist materialist approach (e. g., Alaimo & Hekman 2008; Barad 2003; Dolphijn & van der Tuin 2012), scholars should discuss brain plasticity rather as an intra-active phenomenon; in terms of Karen Barad’s ontoepistemological framework this perspective addresses particularly the dynamic processes that constitute ‘real’ world in-between material and meaning-making (discursive) components (Barad 2007). Using this framing, neuro-materiality has to be discussed in terms of culture, society, cognition, and behavior, which all give meaning to each other in this process of enacting and intraacting. If brain and culture are understood as being indivisibly intertwined in an assemblage of reciprocal exchange, constituting and continuously re-shaping each other, the phenomenon of the brainbody-in-culture is not only passively waiting for its shaping and forming from the outside world. Hence, the disclosure of the impartible entanglements of brainbodies, minds, behaviors, socio-cultural contexts, and meaning making does inspire the feminist neuro-discourse, starting with Elisabeth Wilson’s Neural Geographies (1998) to current accounts for addressing the brain’s agency in a non-essentialist manner (Dussauge & Kaiser 2012a; Kraus 2012a; Schmitz 2014a).

In consequence, a differentiated approach to neurogender also has to respect the fact that the network of brain and sex/gender is constituted through an ongoing dynamic process of biological, psychosocial, and sociocultural intra-actions. This reframing 17

of neuro-epistemologies (see Fine; Joel; Maibom & Bluhm; PittsTaylor; and Roy in this volume) should also allow the questioning of how concepts (even one’s own) and discourses can be read against the backdrop of the feminist debate over materialism (Schmitz forthcoming): Do neurofeminist concepts grasp corporeal materiality beyond essentialist determinism and ontological entities? Do they consider the entanglements and the potential of intra-acting material-discursive components, which mark each other by ascribing meaning to materiality within a particular context? Additionally, does the scientific and popular neurodiscourse bear potential to question the hybrid conceptions of brains-in-cultures in terms of their potentials for disrupting nature–culture dichotomies on both material and epistemological levels, or do the limitations and dichotomist conceptions continue to prevail? And last but not least, does the feminist materialist framework, which particularly highlights the mutual intra-actions of neurocultural phenomena, cover all important aspects in this discourse, or does it also challenge the feminist self-concept of political science (a ‘dissensus’ question to which Jordan-Young will refer in her outlook paper at the end of this volume)?

Secondly, only turning around the cause–effect genealogy does not prevent the use of essentialist concepts. The knowledge production and the scientific framework that is elaborated in the field of neurosciences form the reference point in a wide scope of other disciplines and contemporary academic discourses. Not only the sciences and psychology but also education, economics, sociology, the humanities, and philosophy refer to the results of brain research and account for the individual as a “cerebral subject” (Ortega & F. Vidal 2007)—the anthropological figure of the human according to which the self is constituted by its brain.

Such current neurocultures comprise—and thus could even be called a new paradigm—the way in which thought, behavior, subjectivity, and identity collapse with the brain’s biology.

Neurocultures are based on the development of an all-explanatory epistemology of the brain (Koslow 2000), an endeavor that 18

started in the 1990s with the “Decade of the Brain” and the first “Human Brain Project” (OHBM 2001), sponsored by the US National Academy of Health in the era of George W. Bush, and currently followed up by the second, EU-based “Human Brain Project”3 and the Swiss “Blue Brain Project”4; the latter particularly aims to build the artificial brain computer. The wording in these projects is full of metaphoric pictures of “adventure,” “discovery,” and “enlightenment.” In such, they are again following a metaphysics of science, reaching out for the all-explaining knowledge setup for ‘the human’ (including and referring also to animal studies), similar to the ‘promises’ of bio-technologies that Donna Haraway has already elaborated a decade ago (Haraway 1992).

Sigrid Schmitz has analyzed the specific argumentation of “modern neurodeterminism” that is crucial for these debates.

Modern neurodeterminism does not care whether brain structures and functions are innate or formed by experience; it considers irrelevant whether the individual brain is formed by nature or by nurture. Nevertheless, these paradigms remain based on essentialist concepts of the brain. Brain materiality and functionality are taken as essential to explain and even predict the outcome of behavior at the moment of measurement (for a detailed development of this concept see Schmitz 2012).

There is an interesting ambivalence, which is not articulated in the current neurocultural discourse: while plasticity concepts are included into modern neurodeterminism up to the moment of measuring, they are dropped again when it comes to predicting future behavior. Consequently, although insisting on the forming of biological materiality from outside, the neurocultural discourse is in danger of remaining connected to concepts that presume to predict behavior, thinking, and acting due to biological entities.

The impacts of these normative framings on cultural understandings, social practices, and governmental discourses are critically discussed (Choudhury & Slaby 2011; Choudhury et al. 2009). Neurofeminism has to question particularly the gender-based and intersected legitimations that are drawn on in neurocultural discourse and practices, where neuroscientific knowledge production 19

can be used for different socio-political in- and exclusions (see Fillod; Gumy; Höppner & Schmitz; Matusall; and O’Connell in this volume).

In the modern meritocracy, the plastic brain is used as the starting point for modulating and optimizing human behavior (Maasen & Sutter 2007; Pitts-Taylor 2010). Understanding the brain as an instrument that is open for manipulation and modulation—and that should be enhanced—by using the most diverse technologies, these neuro-optimizations intervene in the body on a deep level and thus co-constitute the cerebral subject (Schmitz 2012).

Brain vocabulary produces a culturally and historically specific version of the human being and, as such, impacts individual, social, cultural, and political spheres. Education, social, and cultural studies as well as philosophical disciplines have referred to the results of brain research and transformed the brain of a body into the central category of the cerebral subject: definitions of the self, social processes, or the idea of a future humanity are debated (Vidal 2009), that is, neuro-argumentation is a central figure in configurations of the “politics of life itself” (Rose 2007), in the emergence of neuro-governmentalities (Maloni 2010; Rose 2005; Rose & Rose 2013) and in new framings of biological citizenship (Rose & Novas 2005). It should be an urgent task for gender and neurofeminist research to reassess and reflect upon these conceptions (Schaper-Rinkel 2012), to work out how deconstructed concepts as brain plasticity are even taken up in times of neoliberal societal settings (Pickersgill 2013; Schmitz forthcoming; see also Fillod; Höppner & Schmitz in this volume), and to analyze the effects of the connected neuroscientific discourses on gendered concepts: Do these new concepts have an emancipatory potential for gendered positions and possibilities of action, or do they—and how do they—retransmit gender binaries and boundaries?

Last but not least, in order to improve neuroscientific knowledge production, it is necessary to reflect both the scientific concepts and methodologies and the transfer of the neuro-scientific ‘findings’ into the public debate (Vidal 2005), in particular in the process of teaching and learning (Schmitz 2014b). Since gen20

dered conceptions and connotations shape individual actions, social practices, and eventually social segregation, such analyses can help to assess the entanglements within and the outcomes of neuro-pedagogies (see Just; Mead Vetter; and Vidal in this volume).

This anthology presents differentiated approaches to analyze scientific knowledge production concerned with sex/gender and the brain as well as their references and impacts in current neurocultures from an interdisciplinary perspective. Gender aspects have to be seriously taken into account within these endeavors on various levels: their empirical significance in neuroscientific research, the close entanglements of neuroscientific research with society, and thus the impacts of neurofacts (in the broadest sense) on gendered (in an intersected sense) cultural symbolisms, social practices, and power relations. Not least, scholarly neurofeminism has to reflect further on the use and misuse of its own concepts. In particular, the embedding of constructive paradigms of neuro-matter-in-society is taken as grounding for recent developments of the optimized human within neoliberal framings. The outcomes, vulnerabilities, and power relations of these developments have to be at the core of future discourse on gendered neurocultures (Schmitz 2014a).

Content and Structure The chapters in the first part of the volume aim to “Improve Neuroscience” by providing “Neurofeminist Empirical Critique and Approaches for a More Gender-Adequate Research.” The contributions include analyses of methodological aspects and biases in the construction of sex/gender and ‘race’ in brain research. From feminist and queer perspectives they reflect the influences of gendered and intersected norms and values in brain research and brain imaging and vice versa the impacts of neuroscientific knowledge production on processes of normalization.

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