34 CHAPTER ONE
characteristics. Whatever female/male behavioral and therefore brain
differences are observed in that particular sample are contingent on
both chronic and short- term factors such as social group (such as social
class, ethnicity), place, historical period, and social context and there-
fore cannot be assumed a priori to be generalizable to other populations
or even situations (such as the same task performed in a different social
context). Each individual’s behavioral and neural phenotype at the mo-
ment of experimentation is the dynamic product of a complex develop-
mental process involving reciprocally influential interactions between
genes, brain, social experience, and cultural context. (Rippon et al. 2014,
4 – 5, emphasis mine)Rippon et al. identify many limits of applying prefigured categories of the
subject to brain properties. Such categories do not monolithically describe
individual traits, and they are not always applicable across persons; they are
situated in contexts and entwined with other factors that render generaliza-
tions inaccurate, and, most provocatively, they are contextual, emerging dif-
ferently in different situations, including experimental contexts. They argue
for recognizing not only existing diversities within sex/gender categories
but also their openness to future transformations. Isabelle Dussauge and
Anelis Kaiser (2012a) argue that gender and sexuality must be understood
as performative, or “constituted in their repeated and contextual making”
(142). Further, “stable categories of gender and sexual preference have to
be left behind; instead, we need to open them up and focus on diversity
not only within these categories but also within individual subjects” (142).
Material Performativity
Performativity theory understands expressions of sexuality or gender (or
other categories of identity) not as essential traits but rather as embodied
events that depend on their continual reiteration to appear stable over time
(Butler 1990, 1993, 2004). As it is commonly understood, performativity
produces gender through the subject’s repetition of normative discourses
and practices that stylize the body.^22 Many critics have pointed out that this
theory risks treating the physical, biological body as a passive, generic site
of social inscription (Barad 2007; Cheah 1996; Colebrook 2000; Grosz 1994;