THE PHENOMENON OF BRAIN PLASTICITY 33tical reorganization, as an effect of masculinizing socialization over time.
In other words, gender roles could influence the volume of the straight
gyrus, rather than the other way around.^21 The plastic brain, understood as
“receptive and adaptive” (Kaiser forthcoming), would be both marked with
and formed by the social patterning of gender (Schmitz 2012).
As feminists writing on the subject are well aware, the use of plasticity to
explain such empirically observed differences as the effect of socialization is
fraught. How well do binary categories describe individuals to begin with?
For example, is social intelligence really a feminine trait? Do all or even
most females really exhibit more social intelligence than most males, and in
the same way, and in every context? The claim that women have distinctive
gendered subject formations, even if rooted in socialization rather than
biology, is essentializing; it reduces the diverse and complex attributes of
body- subjects to binary categories. Similar problems characterize research
on the neural phenotype of poverty. For example, the categorization of
schoolchildren into low and middle ses, and the generalized claims made
about these samples as representative of poor and middle- class people, ob-
scure all of the racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, regional, national, linguistic,
and even economic diversity within class categories. The methodology also
obscures the variations and overlaps in exposure to the very mechanisms
being assumed to make the difference, such as lead toxicity, nutritional
intake, and quality of cognitive stimulation. A neural phenotype of pov-
erty, like a gender- socialized brain, assumes a homogenous and distinctive
patterning of experience across a diverse group of subjects.
Recognizing this, Rippon et al. (2014) argue for alternative models that
do not treat sex/gender as dimorphic, “fixed, invariant, and highly infor-
mative” (1). Instead, they argue that both sex and gender characteristics
should be treated as potentially overlapping in males and females, as multi-
factorial, as contingent on context (including the research context), and as
entangled with social structures. This means,
Any one sample will consist of individuals with an intricate mosaic of
gendered attributes, the distributions for many of which will be largely
overlapping and may not differ at the group level in that particular
sample. Similarly, the individuals in the sample will not have “female”
or “male” brains as such, but a mosaic of “feminine” and “masculine”