Neuroscience and Sex/Gender

Abstract

This special issue publishes interdisciplinary scholarship which aims to map and re-imagine the relations between neuroscience and gender studies. neuroGenderings: The NetworkThe authors of the present special issue were all participants in the workshop neuroGenderings: Critical Studies of the Sexed Brain (Uppsala, 2010). Then coorganizers, now guest editors, we work in gender studies, neuroscience, and science and technology studies. In 2010, we did not know for a fact that the neuroGenderings initiative would grow and develop into an international network and conference series. Now we know.In neuroGenderings, a transdisciplinary and international group of researchers from the neurosciences, the humanities and science studies working on and in the neuroscience of gender convened to discuss the broad theme of sex/gender and the brain. As this specific interdisciplinary field of research usually hosts very different epistemological approaches, a common knowledge of neuroscience and gender studies was a prerequisite for the group's theoretical and methodological exchange. The participants lively debated crucial issues, from current research on sex/gender difference in neuropsychology, through the implications of notions of sex/gender, gender identity and sexuality used in neuroscientific experimentation, to the social workings of a sexed/gendered brain.More precisely, the neuroGenderings workshop achieved an impressive first mapping of the research on sex/gender in neurosciences and the methodological frames used in those sciences. We discussed, for instance, the role assigned to "sexed" regions of the brain, by analyzing the relevance of the notion of sexual dimorphism, itself a system of significance that is always and solely framed by neuro-logical sexual dichotomy. Further, we elaborated on what kind of sex/gender facts, results, and understandings of the brain dominate in neurosciences and how neuroscientific facts about sex/ gender are produced. We recapitulated how neuro-sex/ gender-facts are dependent on our contemporary historical and political context and we discussed some of the ethical and political consequences of neuroscientific knowledge production about sex/gender and sexuality. Not least, neuroGenderings explored the workings of neurosexism without dismissing neuroscience altogether. Neurosexism is a term launched by psychologist Cordelia Fine [1], and it stands for the (mis)use of neuroscientific facts and factoids [2] to assert that women and men are categorically Neuroethics (2012) 5:211-215

Rethinking bibliometric data concerning gender studies: a response to Söderlund and Madison

“…To exclude such clinical matters -though Shildrick herself is a philosopher -seems like a serious flaw in the bibliometric study and one that is undoubtedly repeated in regard to many other areas of the life sciences. There is, for example, now considerable work being done in the neurosciences that explicitly takes off from feminist thought (Bluhm et al 2012;Dussauge and Kaiser 2012;Einstein 2012;Fine 2010;Kaiser and Dussauge 2015;Schmitz and Häppner 2014). Moreover, another excluded area -that of medical ethics -has a particularly strong and well-established record of intervention by feminist scholars, who publish both in mainstream journals and in the more dedicated International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (Shildrick 2008;Zeiler 2009).…”

La diferencia sexual en las neurociencias y la neuroeducación

“…Una de las prácticas habituales en el ámbito de las neurociencias (y también de la neuroeducación) es asimilar el concepto de género al de sexo (Dussauge y Kaiser 2012). De este modo, se analiza la división de género partiendo de la idea de que es la consecuencia de la dualidad de sexos.…”

Decision-Making, Legal Capacity and Neuroscience: Implications for Mental Health Laws

“…Simon Baron-Cohen for example has stated that: "[p]eople with the female brain make the most wonderful counsellors, primary-school teachers, nurses, carers, therapists, social workers, mediators, group facilitators or personnel-staff" ( [42], p. 185). Neil Levy has criticised the approach taken by Baron-Cohen [43] and various authors have coined the term neurosexism to explain how some have used neuroscience to reinforce gender stereotypes [44][45][46].…”