14 INTRODUCTION
dominant hypothesis, called embodied simulation theory, mirror neurons
enable theory of mind, or awareness of other people’s intentions, by regis-
tering others’ motor actions with the same neural mechanisms we use for
our own actions. Similarly, through simulating another’s emotive expres-
sions, mirror neurons are thought to enable a preconscious, bodily expe-
rience of others’ feelings, or empathy. Mirror neurons can be understood
in other ways — as learned or skilled elements of enactive perception, for
example. By comparing multiple accounts of mirror neurons, I show how
the dominant thesis leans heavily on a set of claims about human embod-
iment: that human bodies have shared motor schema, similar relations
to objects, and shared phenomenological experiences of the world, all of
which facilitate the automatic transfer of intersubjective information about
what the other is intending or feeling. This model is influential in affect
studies, but mirror neuron research is enormously controversial because of
its overreach (Hickok 2014; Kilner and Lemon 2013). Rather than embrac-
ing or dismissing mirror neuron research out of hand, I carefully consider
its suppositions about the body and embodiment. I use a grave example of
racism and police violence both to underscore the need to address theory
of mind failures and also to insist that embodiment is not inherently unify-
ing. As one way to contest the generic, universalized social brain, I discuss
research on how learned differences are thought to shape neural responses
in mirror neuron systems.
In chapter 4 I explore biosocial theories of attachment and kinship. So-
cial neuroscientists address kinship through biologically rooted, affective
feelings of attachment. They argue that humans and other mammals are
able to experience sustained social bonds through the involvement of neu-
ral processes linked to affect and memory. They draw heavily from animal
studies of the neurohormone oxytocin, including groundbreaking research
on voles conducted in the 1990s. Like other biological stories of kinship, the
social neuroscientific account is closely tied to reproduction and, for the
most part, focuses on heterosexual partners and mother – infant relations.
Some versions are relentlessly and unacceptably heteronormative. If some
social neuroscientists are getting kinship wrong, as I argue they are, this is
not because they look to the biological body, but because they recognize
only some bonds as biologically real and disallow or ignore the material-
ity of bonds that do not follow heteronormative patterns. Contesting the