THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 13The Brain’s Body
Sex difference research, as I discuss in chapter 1, reveals that there are fun-
damental difficulties with conceptualizing and measuring human same-
ness and difference in the brain. The recognition of neural plasticity does
not ameliorate these problems. I explore this by looking not only at sex/
gender research but also at research on the effects of poverty on the brain.
This work assumes the brain is not only plastic but also situated in social
inequalities. However, it risks essentializing social categories and fixing
them in the developing brain — especially in the brains of those who are
most vulnerable to scrutiny, such as those of minority and poor children.
It also obscures how neuroscientific practices have an effect on (are part
of ) the phenomena they seek to measure (Barad 2007). To conceptualize
social structures, neurobiological bodies, and neuroscientific measurement
together, I address the plastic brain as materially performative.^30
In chapter 2 I examine the resonance between feminism and natural-
ized (and neuro- ) philosophy in theories of the embodied mind. Both lit-
eratures challenge dominant accounts of neurocognition as disembodied
and abstract, and draw from pragmatist and phenomenological ideas of
engaged, practical experience as the basis for perception and knowledge.
By insisting on the epistemic significance of embodiment, they each treat
cognition (or the mind) as situated. But in naturalized philosophy, theories
of embodied cognition often try to account for epistemic universals. This
focus ignores the ways in which social differences can generate cognitive
and affective dissonance — as writings in feminist, queer, disability, and
postcolonial scholarship attest (Hemmings 2012). These critical literatures
have openly wrestled with the problem of essentialism while insisting on
the inadequacy of universalized epistemic claims. I argue for recognition
of embodied multiplicity, including cognitive and affective “misfittings”
of body- minds and worlds. I borrow from Rosemarie Garland- Thomson
(2011) the idea of misfitting, which describes the problems that can occur
when variant bodies meet constraints in the built world.^31
Misfittings also occur between people. In chapter 3 I address mirror
neuron research, which seeks to explain the human capacity for intersub-
jectivity and empathy in terms of automatic, neurophysiological processes
that occur before higher- level cognition or propositional thinking. In the