8 INTRODUCTION
however, there is a “more revolutionary” rethinking of the coconstitution
of the biological and social. There is, then, the potential in the biological
sciences for a “more complex, intersectional understanding of life” (Weasel
in press, 2016). The conceptualization of the brain as social, plastic, and
embodied potentially holds this promise. When brain matter can be under-
stood as complex and multiple, rather than determined and determining,
the prospects for positive theorizing are enlarged. This does not mean there
is no longer need for critique — in fact, I argue precisely the opposite.
Historically, biological determinism and reductionism rendered some
bodies and persons more susceptible to pathologization, erasure, or gov-
ernance than others. As they are overcome by novel paradigms that pro-
pose the plasticity, dynamism, and sociality of biology, do such differential
vulnerabilities persist? In the field of epigenetics, which takes account of
the effects of the environment on the action of genes, Sarah Richardson
shows that “certain bodies or spaces” — in particular, female, maternal
bodies — are amplified as vectors of risk and “become intensive targets of
intervention” (2015, 210). That is, the burden of epigenesis is distributed
unevenly. In this book I focus on empirical and theoretical research pro-
grams in the neurosciences that, like epigenetics, presuppose the interplay
between nature and culture, the coconstitution of the social and biological,
and the situatedness of biological processes in the body and its environs.
They contest mechanistic, genetically determined, and asocial ideas of the
brain and the neurobiological body. They allow nurture into nature. In
principle they have the potential to speak to the complexity, variation, and
multiplicity of experience, rather than merely affirm social norms or justify
the status quo. But the question is, how complex and multiple do they allow
the neurobiological body to be? What vulnerabilities persist, and what new
ones emerge?
Corporeal Politics
To understand bodily (and nervous) morphology, development, and func-
tion, scientific approaches have traditionally treated human bodies phylo-
genetically, as representative of a species, explaining differences between
them in essentialist and reductionist terms, or seeing variances as pathol-
ogies.^13 Many social theories of the body have critiqued this universalizing,