THE SOCIAL BRAIN AND CORPOREAL POLITICS 15misrecognition and erasure of nonheteronormative bonds, I consider how
kinships can be affective, biologically imbricated, and also queer. Most im-
portant, I argue that taking neurobiology seriously while insisting on its
multiplicity can transform what it means to be biologically related. Thus,
even while I engage in feminist and queer critique of social neuroscience, I
also attest to the value of its material perspective for understanding kinship,
attachment, and belonging. It is here I most strenuously argue for positive
theorizing of the neurobiological body in order to more fully recognize the
stakes of its social regulation.
Neuroscientific practices and styles of thought are not monolithic. Em-
bodiment, for example, can be understood as a universal human condition
that provides roughly the same constraints and capacities for all, or it can
be pursued in terms of experiential, phenomenological, physical, and tech-
nological variation. Neuron systems can operate as fixed, automatic, and
precognitive, or they can be symbolically modulated, and therefore affected
by social differences. Neurohormonal systems can work in the service of
monogamy and reproduction, or they can be understood as potentially
queer. Reading these research programs diffractively (Haraway 1997) with
critical literatures on bodies and embodiments, such as those found in fem-
inist, queer, and disability studies, can show “patterns of difference that
make a difference” (Barad in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 49). I hope
not only to make explicit the corporeal politics at stake but also point to the
“different realities and unforeseen possibilities” that can emerge (Timeto
2011, 167).
I make my way from the brain as a plastic and biosocial organ to its
dependence on the rest of the body and its embeddedness in the world. I
also move from the individual to the intersubjective brain/mind, and from
intersubjectivity to intercorporeality. I address a number of different empir-
ical and theoretical research programs in the neurosciences and naturalized
philosophy, some only passingly and others in lengthy detail.^32 I argue for
ways of looking at the neurobiological body that neither presuppose uni-
versality nor overlook the pitfalls of addressing difference. I argue, in other
words, for the multiplicity of the neurobiological body and the specificity
of embodied lives.