Espacestemps . net Penser les humains ensemble . Feminist and Queer Repoliticizations of the Brain

The historical relationship[1] between biology and feminist politics is one of proximity and distance, of tensions and contradictions. This is particularly obvious in the current golden age of neuroscience, when arguments supporting sexism, the inevitability of the sex/gender difference, and the equalization of sexuality with heterosexuality, for example, are reformulated based on the findings from brain research. The neurosciences have come to function as an arena where contemporary Western societies expect to resolve increasingly more social and political issues, and seek to use it exclusively to explain human behavior (cf. Ortega et Vidal 2007). The conflicted link between feminism and the neurosciences is unsurprising since, as sociologist Bruno Latour (1988/1984) notoriously formulated and as was later reiterated by biologist and philosopher Donna Haraway (1984) : “science is politics by other means”. Over the past decades, many different feminist engagements have had to deal with the public figure of a deterministic brain and biological explanations of sex/gender differences.