10 INTRODUCTION
difference do not adequately grasp the fleshly and lived realities of bodily
variance (e.g., Siebers 2008; Baril forthcoming).^17 To capture the experience
of having a material- semiotic body, a body that is both materially real and
symbolically shaped, Tobin Siebers uses the term complex embodiment.
The theory of complex embodiment sees “the body and its representations
as mutually transformative. Social representations obviously affect the ex-
perience of the body... but the body possesses the ability to determine
its social representation as well” (2008, 25 – 26). My project here might in
part be described as an argument for complex and complexly embrained
embodiment.
In feminism, the treatment of the biological and social as separate
spheres has been both commonplace and controversial. Recently, though,
the coconstitution of nature and culture has become a key focus of feminist
theorizing.^18 Feminist materialism (or “neo”-^ materialism) explores biology
as both agentic and entangled with social meanings and cultural practices.^19
For example, feminists engage with quantum physics, dynamic systems,
biology, epigenetics, neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and other scientific
fields to challenge modernist, mechanistic views of matter.^20 The modernist
vision sees biological matter as fixed, predictable, governed by natural laws
that are incontrovertible, and producing effects that are the inevitable out-
comes of such laws. By contrast, neo- materialism embraces a conception
of matter as deeply situated and dynamic. It sees biology as “an open mate-
riality, a set of (possibly infinite) tendencies and potentialities that may be
developed, yet whose developments will necessarily hinder or induce other
developments and other trajectories” (Grosz 1994, 191). New materialist
readings of neuroscience describe not merely the influence of culture on
neurobiology but also the immanent multiplicity of neural matter itself, its
refusal to be fully predictable (E. Wilson 1998, 2004, 2010, 2015).^21
The neurobiological body is now being put to many tasks in contempo-
rary social theory. Scholars turn to the brain and nervous systems to explain
affect and intercorporeality, to contest intellectualist and representationalist
accounts of the self and the subject, and to elaborate biological matter as
both biosocial and agentic. They draw from certain research programs in
neurocognitive science and naturalized philosophy, especially those that
foreground the brain’s relationality with the rest of the body and the envi-
ronment, extend the boundaries of the individual brain/body, or highlight