Cosmopolitics and the Brain: The Co-Becoming of Practices in Feminism and Neuroscience

Abstract

While teaching a class on “Sex, Gender and the Brain,” or giving a presentation on feminism and neuroscience, I often begin my lectures by using a slide with which I admit to having a tenuous but productive relationship. The power point slide, which I put together in a rather obvious cut and paste aesthetic, is of an fMRI image taken from a study on gender differences in the brain. Below the fMRI image of the brain, I have inserted the words “This is not a brain,” in a dark brown cursive font and in clear imitation of Rene Magritte’s phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” from his painting The Treachery of Images.¹ When I first put the slide together a few years back, it was in the vein of providing some comic relief at the beginning of a talk, as many academics like to do, but I also intended to use the image as a launching pad for a more critical discussion at the intersection of neuroscience and feminist theory. More recently, I have turned to using the slide as an entryway into discussions around the politics of representation and questions of materiality. I continue to use the slide but I must admit, I find myself wondering what other acts of treachery this image may be evoking to unsuspecting audiences, intentionally or unintentionally on my part. I also wonder how I can move from what may begin initially as an acknowledgment of betrayals and mistrust between the humanities and sciences to a place where the irony of this slide can be shifted slightly and turned into a moment of shared laughter or humor that produces the possibility for new interdisciplinary conversations and questions regarding the matter and materiality of the brain.

Thought is not arborescent, and the brain is not a rooted or ramified matter. What are wrongly called “dendrites” do not assure the connection of neurons in a continuous fabric. The discontinuity between cells, the role of the axons, the functioning the synapses, the existence of synaptic microfissures, the leap each message makes across these fissures, make the brain a multiplicity immersed in its plane of consistency or neuroglia, a whole uncertain, probabilistic system (“the uncertain nervous system”). Many people have a tree growing in their heads, but the brain itself is much more a grass than a tree. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 15)