22 CHAPTER ONE
instance of the “generativity and resilience of material forms with which
social actors interact, forms which circumscribe, encourage, and contest
their discourses” (Coole and Frost 2010, 26). Rather than freedom from
biology, the plastic brain may suggest that biology itself entails a kind of
freedom, which is found in the multiplicity of its potential and the unpre-
dictability of its actualization. Deleuzian readings of synaptic plasticity, for
example, lend the brain a radically agential character, even while rendering
it vulnerable to control society. It is variously described as a “reservoir of
potential” (Hauptmann 2010, 20); one that has a capacity to “explode its
form” (Malabou 2008, 12); as having an “outsider” status, as “anomalous”
and “unintelligible” (Watson 1998, 42); as engaged in conditioned reflexes
but also “creative tracings” that are entirely new (Murphie 2010, 8); as en-
tangled with technologies that allow body- subjects to “re- configure our
neural connections all the time,” rendering us multiple, able to do and be
many things at once (Rotman 2000, 74).
Rather than ontogenetically unique, creative, and unpredictable, the
plastic brain can be also seen as habituated, imprinted by the social pat-
terning and regularity of experience. The plastic brain, according to some
of the research discussed below, is not indifferent to its surroundings but
rather inextricably dependent on them.^ Despite the temptation to read it
primarily in terms of biological freedom, one can also see in neuroplasticity
the brain’s vulnerability to its environment, its exposure to and situatedness
in the world, including to language, values, and social structures. For some
observers, plasticity means not freedom and agency but rather cultural in-
scription, that “from birth on, our mind as well as the correlated brain
structures are essentially shaped by social and cultural influences” (Fuchs
2005, 115). This may mean that the plastic brain is susceptible to social hier-
archies and inequalities, perhaps even expressed in phenotypes such as a
gendered or classed brain. In feminist writings the plastic brain resists bi-
ological determinism, largely through its openness to cultural shaping and
influence, including gender socialization (Schmitz and Hoeppner 2014).
For feminist empiricists, evidence of brain plasticity is a resource to cri-
tique scientific sex/gender bias and an alternative explanation for findings
of sex differences in the brain. Although feminists are highly critical of
neuroscientific claims of bifurcated sex difference, some suggest that the
brain’s vulnerability to gender training may explain observable differences