124 CONCLUSION
related with poverty. Particular neural processes assigned to specific brain
regions are elicited, compared, and found to act (in some ways) differently.
These neural differences, sometimes irrespective of their relation to cogni-
tive performance, are interpreted as neural inequalities. Here, the plastic,
biosocial brain gains a class phenotype through biosocial reductionism.
The concern I have about this research is not that it sees social inequal-
ities as having biological import. Social inequalities and power relations
should be brought to bear on how we think about the brain, mind, and body,
and neuroscientific accounts need to be cognizant of the different ways that
power and inequality can affect lives. But how? What sorts of measures
are appropriate for grasping this in its complexity? When a childhood is
marked by economic vulnerability, chronic stress, and food insecurity, the
question is not whether this is experienced neurobiologically. The ques-
tions are many, including, How generalizable is that experience, and for
whom? How generalizable are its effects, and in what contexts? With what
mediating factors? Across what temporalities? To what degree are these cap-
tured by existing methods? Bifurcated measures of class difference are not
only essentializing; they also presume a singular norm against which vari-
ances can be measured, while ignoring the relations between the variances.
(How is addressing “poverty,” for example, different than addressing “in-
equality”?). Most worryingly, they enable practices of neurogovernance —
such as the targeting of the prefrontal cortices of poor and often minority
children — that are justified with reference to social problems that are wo-
ven through with classism and racism. To be clear: The “poverty brain” is
far from a mere social construction. Rather, it is a particular enactment of
neural difference that has real, material effects.
When social differences are neurally instantiated, they do not cease to
be social and situated. Feminists have argued that the social institution of
gender affects brains, largely in response to neuroscientific observations
of neural sex differences. However, they generally refuse to transcribe es-
sentialized categories onto neurobiological bodies. Instead, they argue for
disentangling aggregated properties and traits, which often are lumped to-
gether in bifurcated categories, in order to see their complex, over lapping
distributions across multiple categories of research subjects and experi-
mental contexts (Rippon et al. 2014). On this account, gender is not a bio-