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Towards Diffractive Transdisciplinarity: Integrating Gender Knowledge into the Practice of Neuroscientific Research

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Abstract

The current neurosciences contribute to the construction of gender/sex to a high degree. Moreover, the subject of gender/sex differences in cognitive abilities attracts an immense public interest. At the same time, the entanglement of gender and science has been shown in many theoretical and empirical analyses. Although the body of literature is very extensive and differentiated with regards to the dimensions of ‘neuroscience of gender’ and ‘gender in neuroscience’, the feeding back of these findings into the field of neuroscience remains a desideratum. Especially, the question of how gender knowledge, i.e. insights from feminist theory on gender/sex and from gender and science studies on knowledge production, may be integrated and applied within the neurosciences has been strongly neglected. Presumably due to their epistemic culture and epistemological presuppositions, these critical engagements are conceived as externalist by critical scholars and neuroscientists alike. In this context, the question arises of how substantiated gender knowledge may be accounted for in neuroscientific research practice? The article outlines methodological considerations for a critical research agenda in the cognitive neurosciences. I present thoughts on how insights and expertise from gender and science studies can be taken into account in the neuroscientific practice of knowledge production. Starting from the assumption that changes in neuroscientific research practices are possible, my aim is to point out possibilities of integrating gender knowledge into the neurosciences.

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Notes

  1. I use this unfamiliar combination of the two terms ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ to mark the complexity of these concepts and their entanglements. This will be clarified later in this article.

  2. Here I refer to Evelyn Fox Keller’s dimensions of feminist analysis of the gender-science-system [10]: women in science, the analysis of structural and symbolic explanations for the underrepresentation of women in the field of science; b) science of gender, the analysis of the scientific construction of gender/sex; and c) gender in science, the analysis of processes of gendering in research aims, theory development, methods and interpretations.

  3. Some refer to this field as ‘gender and science studies’ or ‘gender studies of science’.

  4. The works by Deboleena Roy and by Anelis Kaiser and their colleagues can be regarded as the rare exceptions to this rule [cf. 2, 28–31].

  5. Gender studies as a transdisciplinary field are viewed as being situated mainly in the humanities and social sciences.

  6. Isabelle Dussauge & Anelis Kaiser: call for papers for the workshop “NeuroGenderings: Critical Studies of the Sexed Brain”, Uppsala University, March 25–27, 2010.

  7. Here I refer to unpublished data from an analysis of neuroscientific research articles on mental rotation using functional MRI as an experimental paradigm. However, a scan of research papers on other neuroscientific topics and approaches suggests that these observations can be generalised.

  8. This strand of scholarship has been described as “material feminisms” [44] or “new feminist materialism” [45].

  9. I elaborate on this point in more detail elsewhere [21].

  10. In this paper I cannot follow up the criticism that exists against ‘innovation’ and the scientific idea of linear progress as well as the problem of economic appropriation of critical thinking.

  11. In order to think about the third aspect there needs to be some awareness, of course, that there actually might be a ‘problem with gender’.

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Acknowledgements

Some ideas set out in this paper have been previously presented by the author at the workshop “NeuroGenderings: Critical Studies of the Sexed Brain” held at Uppsala University, March 25–27, 2010. I wish to thank the workshop participants as well as my students for useful remarks and discussions. Further, I gratefully acknowledge insightful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript by Nicole Scheifhacken and the anonymous reviewers, which helped to improve the article. Finally, I thank Anita Hopes for stylistic support and proofreading.

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  1. Department of Mathematics, Gender in Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Universität Hamburg, Bundesstr. 55, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Katrin Nikoleyczik

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Nikoleyczik, K. Towards Diffractive Transdisciplinarity: Integrating Gender Knowledge into the Practice of Neuroscientific Research. Neuroethics 5, 231–245 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12152-011-9135-3

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