THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 5as the product of embodied experience, is seen to provide the foundation
for (and is reflected in) social structures, and is subject to intervention
and transformation. In these ways the social brain collapses the distinction
between nature and culture. Although it is not framed as such in scientific
accounts, the plastic, social brain also reveals neurobiology to be political —
that is, capable of change and transformation, and open to social struc-
tures and their contestation.^7 This book is concerned with the corporeal
politics of the brain and the neurobiological body. I address, on the one
hand, how social norms, power, and inequality affect representations of the
brain and, on the other, how they are understood to literally entangle with
neurobiological processes. I draw from feminism, queer theory, disability
studies, feminist science studies, philosophy, and sociology, as well as the
neurosciences, to address the limits of current scientific conceptions of the
social brain, and also to explore the queerer possibilities that can be found
in neurobiological data.^8
Science and Critique
The centrality of the brain in contemporary thought and public life — the
“neuroscientific turn” — is hugely worrying for many critics. To begin, it
raises the dual specters of biological determinism and neuroreductionism.
Biological psychiatry has long been faulted for treating mental illnesses
exclusively in terms of receptors, pathways, and neurochemicals, while ig-
noring or downplaying biographical and social contributions to mental
suffering. The more fundamental reduction of all mental content to neural
processes can have the effect of dismissing social and cultural aspects of the
mind, psyche, and behavior. It may impose universalized conceptions of
biology onto mind and cognition, and pathologize those who do not meet
normative brain measures. Neuroreductionism, the view that “human be-
ings are essentially their brains” (Vidal and Ortega 2011, 7), also marginal-
izes fields that use hermeneutic and interpretive methods, rather than nar-
rowly empirical ones, and has the potential to dominate the understanding
of health, wellness, and personal identity in everyday life.^9 Further, it can
enable the naturalization of social inequalities. Historically, scientific asser-
tions about human nature have been “a politics by other means” (Asberg
and Birke 2010, 414), used to pathologize women and racial and ethnic