The Brain's Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics

by Victoria Pitts-Taylor

In The Brain's Body Victoria Pitts-Taylor brings feminist and critical theory to bear on new development in neuroscience to demonstrate how power and inequality are materially and symbolically entangled with neurobiological bodies. Pitts-Taylor is interested in how the brain interacts with and is impacted by social structures, especially in regard to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability, as well as how those social structures shape neuroscientific knowledge. Pointing out that some brain scientists have not fully abandoned reductionist or determinist explanations of neurobiology, Pitts-Taylor moves beyond debates over nature and nurture to address the politics of plastic, biosocial brains. She highlights the potential of research into poverty's effects on the brain to reinforce certain notions of poor subjects and to justify particular forms of governance, while her queer critique of kinship research demonstrates the limitations of hypotheses based on heteronormative assumptions. In her exploration of the embodied mind and the "embrained" body, Pitts-Taylor highlights the inextricability of nature and culture and shows why using feminist and queer thought is essential to understanding the biosociality of the brain.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Science, Psychological, Neuroscience, Queer

192 pages, Paperback

First published March 11, 2016

About the author

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor of Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University and the author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture.

Reviews

[sootski · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have technically no thoughts about this but the fact that i had to reread everything multiple times to understand pissed me off hence minus two starts

[Cris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've always wanted a book like this for years, but never knew it existed. If you are like me you have wanted it when talking to biological essentialists deriving reductive frameworks from flawed empiricism and while talking to some leftists who somehow want to deny having biological/material, and not purely discursive/social, constituents. It's an incredibly well-written and thoughtful review of neuroscience showing that separating biological and social understandings of the mind are faulty--I never want to read another science review if it doesn't have disability justice, queer theory, and post colonial theory in the gd lit review. It's also clarifying and validating as a reader to see tangible and well-articulated ways in which our biological tendencies and social scripts/behaviors co-constitute each other in multidirectional ways

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book operates on this pathway: Study, implications of study, critical lens of study, how it relates to intersectionality/intersubjectivity, validates or invalidates study based on its compatibility to the antecedent. The book ends in saying that neuroscience as a whole operates around paradigms of simplification that dehumanize others that don't fit the status quo of what was the impetus for the study in the first place -i.e. motherhood-, and thus must be reexamined to account for complexities that are unaccounted for. This logic is seemingly ridiculous. The book is a sloppy handling of Sapolsky's Behave and doesn't add value to the discussion. Additionally, rather than showing the enormous scientific literature that validates the contextualized nature of biological "determinism," the book draws on feminist talking points that are not relevant to the discuss of the philosophy of mind -while additionally resting its criticism on its logic. Because of its tiptoeing and oscillation between biological tendencies (habitus within habitus), it over-emphasizes any study that aligns with its goal that was already stated, rather than forming an ideology around the science it forms the science around its ideology. Besides for being dogma, the book does synthesize some good critiques and does so effectively.

[Tomás Narvaja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent book that covers extremely clearly the present state of Feminist Science Studies and Neuroscience. I wish Pitts-Taylor had added more of her own contribution to the text as it felt mainly like a review of a lot of literature, but the way in which she brings everything together is in and of itself a sufficient contribution to leave me relatively satisfied. I do think she could have taken her claims and theory a bit further and I felt left wanting more, but maybe that is for the best as she leaves it open for additional engagement and expansion.

[Wesley Vaught · Rating 5 out of 5]

Creates a beautiful literature scaffolding for feminist STS of neuroscience and the cognitive sciences. A stellar introduction into having a “care ethic” in neuroscience by cushioning much of the discussion within critical disability studies (DisCrit) frameworks. Could see this a great text for those interested in the study of neurodiversity/divergence.

[Sydney Chapados · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent, comprehensive, interesting??? Imagine that.