Goldberg’s brain and the sex/gender distinction

The rise and negotiation of neuroscience

Nikolas Rose (2007) traces a historical shift from eugenic rationalities, associated with nationalism, to the biopolitics of liberal democracies which explicitly promote the ‘freedom’ and self-determination of the global citizen. This is typified by shifts in emphasis from the population to the individual, from a concern with evolutionary fitness to the quality of life, from public to domesticated spaces, from the logics of mortality to that of vitality, and from a politics of population quality to (individual) risk management. Intimately related to this is a growing promotion since the 1980s of an ‘ethics of enterprise, responsibility, and self-actualisation’ (Rose, 2007: 109) and a body-subject who is ‘free yet responsible, enterprising yet prudent’ (Rose, 2007: 111) whilst aiming at improving its own well-being. For Rose (2007: 130), this is a move from the depth-ontology typical of 20th century psychology, characterised by concern with the nature of our psychological interiors, to a post-ontological view where the world is ‘flattened’ into surfaces, with aspects of being human becoming ‘relays in complex, ramifying, and non-hierarchical networks, filiations, and connections’.

In line with this emphasis are the contemporary direct mappings by neuroscience of cognition, emotion and desire onto the surfaces of the brain, constituting what Rose (2008: 460) variably calls ‘cerebral subjectivity’, ‘somatic individuality’ or the ‘neurochemical self’. In accordance with the principles of neoliberal subjectivity, such a self is not construed as a passive or determined entity but as an active agent who is required to take up new responsibilities and engage in new forms of self-surveillance and regulation in the light of new forms of biological interrogation and revelation. This emerging economy also involves a reduction of self to body so that ‘[m]ind is [then] simply what the brain does’ (Rose, 2007: 192). Aside from the neuroreductionism this represents, Moore (2010), on a broader level, warns that the elimination of the distinction between the body and the self must be considered carefully for it potentially leaves intact various problematic notions of gender, which threaten to reduce us to the vulnerable anatomies associated with feminine stereotypes. Rose (2007) wonders whether neuroscience will replace psychology in the new century as the principle way of understanding our conduct. If so, brain science would become the new ‘social’ science, the new dubious control technology.

What are some of the implications of such a ubiquitous neuroscience for critical projects? We suggest that one consequence is that what is instituted through critical readings, such as our reading of Goldberg’s work here, is a shift from a critical psychology to a critical neuroscience. This seems inevitable given the growing dominance in the 21st century of the brain-mind economy, of what Rose (2008) calls ‘brainhood’, the Cartesianism for the new materialist millennium. In parallel to a critical psychology agenda, as articulated by Prilleltensky and Fox (1997), critical neuroscience is broadly defined here as an intimate engagement which disrupts neuroscience’s conservative practices and agendas and, furthermore, endeavours to use its findings and ideas in emancipatory directions. It would also then be an endeavour which, like other such critical projects, runs the risk of pacifying institutionalisation and naïve antagonism, in that it could easily become absorbed into neuroscience’s burgeoning disciplinary structure or, in response to such a danger, may actively exclude itself only to simultaneously sacrifice its disruptive potency. We thus agree with Wilson (1998) that this requires a careful and ongoing negotiation, by feminists, of this unavoidable tension.

Preceding this recent turn to neuroscience by critically-oriented social scientists has been a more general turn to theorising and studying the body (Blackman, 2008). The internal workings of the body have, typically, remained outside of the concerns of many who have made this turn to corporeality. Some constructionists and feminists, through the work of theorists such as Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Bourdieu, have returned to the body as more than an object of discourse, but rather to a materiality formed by the socio-political orders in which it exists. Yet the biological aspects of the body are seldom mentioned. The absence of biology has been for reasons other than parsimony, for the term has been burdened by associations that have only recently been questioned.

Morgan (2005) and Wilson (1998) refer to the restrictive biology/social binary that lies at the heart of the (pure) sex and (social) gender binary. The consequence of this is that it implies a biology which is innate, passive, inert, ahistorical and (at best) politically impotent; the raw material upon which constructionism works (Grosz, 1996). Biology in particular has been kept at a distance in feminist writing (Hekman, 1998; Kirby, 1991; Wilson, 1998). Here, very often, to talk of biology is to enter into the realm of essentialism where biological determinism is inevitable and women’s bodies become fixed by patriarchal agendas. Bordo (1998) identifies how biology has been regarded as turf for scientists, an apolitical terrain outside of the critical programme.

Grosz (1994a) argues that feminism has confused biology with ‘biologism’. Through this distinction she attempts to remove the real of biology from the particular discursive regimes through which it is ‘described’ and constructed. Biologism is associated with patriarchal essentialism; interpretations that attempt to fix biology into place, to present it as unproblematically present and static (Wilson, 1998). Furthermore, as Wilson (1998: 53) points out, for feminism to leave ‘this (biological) body’ aside in fear of contamination by the aforementioned is to surrender materiality to determinist and patriarchal readings. Through this, biological, including neurological, knowledges, as represented for example by Goldberg’s work, continue to develop under the guise of apolitical ventures undisturbed by critical projects that, through a sweep of the hand, dismiss a vast area of work potentially open to radical colonisation. This exclusion extends beyond neurology to the fields of cognition and perception, setting up the false dichotomy of political and apolitical knowledges. The political nature of biology and the radical potential of biological theories are left unexplored as a result of such responses.

For Wilson (1998), however, the critical project cannot maintain a pure outsider position to what it studies but is always contaminated (influenced, or skewed) by that which it attempts to question. This inevitable contamination cannot simply be avoided or denied for, as indicated, this excludes potentially powerful critical resources, surrenders fields to scientific orthodoxy and results in stereotyping, unexamined and dogmatic responses by those committed to emancipatory causes. The question is then not whether critical ventures should engage with biology but, rather, how they then should occupy this field.

For Grosz (1994a), Kirby (1991) and Wilson (1998) possibilities exist for biology beyond the determinist notions feared by feminism, ones that regard biology as a socio-political expression (Grosz, 1994a) and biology and culture as inextricably intimate (Wilson, 1998). These readings tend to place biology in a less passive role where the biological body is able to rewrite itself once its intimacy with the social is acknowledged (Kirby, 1991), where biology is a form of writing rather than the written (Wilson, 1998). The aim of such projects that enter the realms of biology is to investigate the writing of subjectivity and the social at its most basic physiological level (Unger, 1993, cited in Wilson, 1998), to consider what the ‘political contributions of biological matter’ are, and to reveal biocultural instantiations of the body (Wilson, 1998: 62).

An increasing number of critical re-engagements with biology have emerged over the last two decades. Cromby (2004), countering discursive reductionism, has drawn on the work of the neurologists Antonio Damasio and Michael Gazzaniga to return an embodied subjectivity to social constructionism. Lewis (2002) draws on neurological research to develop a model that provides a biological underpinning for dialogical self theory. Watson (1998) attempts to demonstrate a convergence between the critical philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the theories on affect and consciousness of Gerald Edelman and Daniel Dennett. Similarly Globus (1995) uses connectionist neurological models as an empirical instantiation of Derrida’s post-structuralism. These studies all demonstrate an engagement with the biological as supplement, that is, either as a material or empirical instantiation of an idea or as a conceptual resource for the expansion of an existing critical social theory. This is a notable trend of engagement for both the social and biological sciences (Blackman et al., 2008).

Others, notably those pursuing a more feminist agenda, have engaged with biology as an excessive and complex materiality that troubles existing traditional and critical conceptualisations. McCarthy and Konkle (2005) empirically ground a response critical of the oversubscription in biological research of sex difference in the explanation of non-reproductive neural substrate dissimilarities and the concurrent marginalisation of evidence of sex similarities. Keane and Rosengarten (2002) draw on biological research to disrupt traditional dualistic notions of the sexed body whilst Wilson (1998, 2004) has used biology, including neurology, to both disrupt patriarchal logics and to provide critical resources for feminist politics. Brennan’s (2004) consideration of endocrinal processes in the interpersonal communication of affect challenges individualism and ocular- and cogito-centrism. The reading detailed in our article approximates the ambitions of this collection of work via a (mis)reading of a particular text by an eminent ‘proper name’ in neuroscience. Aside from hoping to disrupt the naïve and conservative empiricism of neuroscience, its objective is to make visible the critical potency of neuroscience through a direct engagement with influential contemporary work in the field.

Our objective here is to follow the suggestions of Wilson (1998) and to engage with the neurological not as an object for critique but as a resource for critical theorising. More specifically, it is to ‘build a critically empathic alliance with neurology’ (Wilson, 2004: 29). This concentration on the neurological body requires us to find ways of reading the products of neuroscience not in a naïve empirical way, as a resource comprised of multiple un-invested, asocial and supplementary facts, but in a spirit of negotiation, one informed of the dangers of complicity, one seeking the ‘faithful transgression’ (Wilson, 1998: 36).

Given the above, we have read Goldberg’s text under the guidance of a collection of writings which attempt to articulate the ‘strategy’, ‘method’ and logic of deconstruction (Culler, 1982; Hepburn, 1999; Royle, 2000; Spivak, 1974; Wilson, 1998). Not a universal method, deconstruction resembles the critical procedures articulated by Osbeck (2005) and Yanchar et al., (2005) in that what is emphasised is the importance of the particularity of the (con)text under consideration and the consequent creativity required in the generation of methodological procedures. As with the aforementioned texts, what is sought through deconstructive readings are new configurations that allow for innovative directions in thought and activity. In contrast to the standardised methodological procedures sought by projects of universal ambition, deconstruction’s ‘method’ is always cast in motion and so strategies, arguments and justifications are subservient to the consideration at hand. Here the particularity of the text under contemplation is important since deconstruction is a ‘faithful intervention’ (Wilson, 1998: 29); that is, it works within the unique convolutions of the text. With its inherent political orientation and concern with institutional influences (Beardsworth, 1996; Culler, 1982; Hepburn, 1999), deconstruction echoes Osbeck’s (2005) emphasis on the ethical value of research. There would thus be no allowing for a privileged ground that is beyond critical examination; no solution is final, no space is finally established, as readings are continuously (re)opened to usurpation (Yanchar et al., 2005).

Wilson (2004) has argued that paying close attention to the minutiae of the neural articulated in reductionist neuroscience may offer surprising avenues for the development of feminist theory. For Wilson (1998: 87), deconstruction involves the rigorous examination of the irresolvable movement and partition between science and interpretation, between empiricism and theory, so as to ‘address the logic that enforces the political and epistemological abyss between data and interpretation’, to ‘refigure the traditional difference between a scientific project and an interpretive one’, as ‘an epistemological and political intervention that neither science nor philosophy, traditionally conceived, could realise’. It is a relationship that effectively places ‘science under erasure, a science at odds with the binarism that seeks to control it’ (Wilson, 1998: 88). As such, deconstruction provides the route through which to challenge attempts to separate science and criticism, those moves that divide the (neurological) body from the socio-political. Given this, we now turn our gaze to Goldberg’s work.

Goldberg’s troublesome brain

In The Executive Brain, in a section entitled ‘Male and female cognitive styles’, Goldberg (2001: 92) asks: ‘Are the gender differences in decision-making styles biologically or culturally determined to begin with?’ From the formulation of this question we may draw several conclusions. First, Goldberg uses the term ‘gender’ as a synonym for ‘sex’. In other words, since gender differences can be biologically or culturally determined, he is not following the biological/social distinction where ‘sex’ is stable and biological and ‘gender’ is contingent and social (Grosz, 1990). This erasure of the distinction amongst researchers in medicine and related disciplines has been noted (Kimball, 2007; Poulin, 2007), and can also, ironically, be evidenced in medical approaches such as gender-based medicine (for example, New York Amsterdam News, 2000).

As is well known, in the social sciences the sex/gender binary is commonly understood as a base/superstructure model, where sex represents the materiality of the body and gender the level of cultural interpretation and inscription (Hood-Williams, 1996; Kirby, 1991). In such a schema, the body takes on the status of body-object, pre-discursive and asocial, the body as biomedical anatomy (Morgan, 2005). Gender becomes the significances society attributes to sexed bodies within particular cultural orders (Butler, 1993). The binary thus locates the body as outside of meaning (Grosz, 1996), and political action is then only possible at the level of gender (Wilson, 1998). Critical attention must then be paid to the countering of man-made systems of representation (Hughes and Witz, 1996) through the development of new systems of signification and representation of women (Grosz, 1996). Within this framework the body, which would then include the brain, features; at the level of discourse where analysis focuses on how it is represented in various cultural niches (Hughes and Witz, 1996), as a substance in which culture inscribes particular embodiments (Grosz, 1996) and as a physical reality which constrains the expression of gender (Morgan, 2005). Having established this primary distinction, feminism then sets in motion a number of theoretical engagements with gender, or more specifically, with masculinity and femininity. As will be highlighted, this reading of the distinction has not been without its critics, and is troubled by our reading of Goldberg’s text.

Second, by referring to decision-making styles as biologically or culturally determined, Goldberg (2001) also draws a clear distinction between biology and culture, where the former must then be genetic and outside of culture, and the latter social and outside of the corporeal. Decision-making ‘styles’ must then be ‘determined’ by either one of these. Furthermore, Goldberg aligns our ability to make decisions with the anterior cortical structures known as the prefrontal lobes. These structures are one of several heteromodal associative cortices of the brain, which Goldberg argues have an ‘emergent’ cortical architecture. Unlike structures where function is ‘prededicated’, emergent structures consist of neural tissue where the function is not determined a priori, that is, it is not ‘genetically prespecified’ but, rather, such tissues ‘assume their function through self-organising processes in neural networks as a result of their interaction with the environment’ (Goldberg, 1990: 266). To ask whether a particular ability – decision-making – associated with a neural structure open to social influence is either biologically or culturally determined is illogical within this context.

It becomes clear that when Goldberg (2001: 94) investigates this question and spends time delineating the ‘morphological gender differences and asymmetries’ of the frontal lobes he is not interested in whether certain behaviours are considered ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ (he never uses these terms); instead he is trying to tie particular cognitive styles to bodies with a particular ‘genital morphology’ (Grosz, 1990: 334), that is, he is directly linking cognition to ‘sex’. His claim is that males display a context-dependent (CD) style of decision-making and women a context-independent (CI) style, and that his research shows these differences to be ‘both robust and significant’ (Goldberg, 2001: 89). CD refers to a style where choice is based on contingent aspects of the situation whilst CI refers to a more principle-based form (‘universal default strategy’) of decision making (Goldberg, 2001: 91). Goldberg points out that ‘[n]either strategy is better than the other in an absolute sense’ but that CI works better in a more stable environment and where ‘an individual’s grasp on the situation is shaky’ (Goldberg, 2001: 92). To make the implication of this bluntly clear: Females are attributed a style which works best in unchanging climes where a good understanding of a complex or unfamiliar situation is unnecessary.

At this point we would be justified in calling this reading to a halt and pointing out that Goldberg’s research is sexist, repeating an antiquated stereotype that positions women as inferior to men in dealing with the complexity of the (changing) world. The above is also then an example of biologism, where such differences are grounded on empirically-observed neural differences, thus using science to justify the patriarchal social order. This would be the point at which we could abandon the text, referring to it as evidence for, and an example of, the conservative agenda of mainstream neuroscience. However, it is here that we wish to resist this action, and continue following the convolutions of Goldberg’s logic, looking for an opening where his intentions unravel and we find ourselves in unexpected territory closer to the landscape we wish to occupy.

The interesting point about the claim of a ‘robust and significant’ linkage between a ‘cognitive style’ and a particular sex is how it is then softened by Goldberg (2001): He indicates that, in the experiment in question, ‘males were more context dependent and females were more context independent’, indicating that we do not have here a perfect one style to one sex fit (Goldberg, 2001: 89, emphases added). Later he points out that ‘in subtle ways individuals tend to gravitate toward one or the other approach’ and that ‘females as a group have a subtle preference toward context-independence and males toward context-dependence’ (Goldberg, 2001: 92, emphases added). Also ‘very few people adhere to one or other strategy in its pure form; most people are able to switch between them at will, or to adopt mixed strategies’ (Goldberg, 2001: 92, emphases added). In fact, rigid adherence to one style is associated with frontal lobe pathology. Having said this, to then later say that ‘male and female cognitive decision-making strategies are different’ seems a rather simplistic imposition of a male/female binary on a rather more complex phenomenon (Goldberg, 2001: 96).

However, how can we make sense of this absence of a one style to one sex match? We could argue that we are dealing here with a gender-based practice, that is, that females are generally encouraged to engage in the more ‘feminine’ form of CI decision-making. Being thus socially determined, the presence of both styles across both sexes would be understandable. This is then a typical imposition of a sex/gender binary where the biological is left as static and variation is regarded as socially determined. But as mentioned, Goldberg (2001: 97–98) is doing something more than this, he is trying to align cognition to morphology, to indicate that there is a ‘more or less direct relationship between structure and function’. In terms of certain feminist readings, this would be regarded as an exercise in essentialism, biologism and universalism (Grosz, 1990). The accusation could be made that with such a set of conceptual commitments, Goldberg is attempting to ‘rationalise and neutralise the prevailing sexual division of social roles by assuming that these are the only, or the best, possibilities, given the confines of the nature, essence or biology of the two sexes’ (Grosz, 1990: 335). It is, we suspect, a claim that Goldberg (2001: 93, emphases in original) would interrogate, given that earlier in his book he writes about how he is ‘sometimes assaulted when a statement of gender difference is militantly misconstrued as a statement of gender inferiority’.

The point that difference does not necessarily imply inferiority – that is, that we are dealing here with a binary opposition (masculine/feminine) that is not necessarily, in itself, hierarchical – is a point also made in the feminist literature (e.g. Gatens, 1991). The countering of the notion that something is essentially or naturally inferior is, of course, the basic critical gesture where that which is taking-for-granted is opened to question. It is, however, a pursuit that should also be tempered by Derrida’s (2004) warning that remaining at the level of gesture and affirmation of equality without consequent interrogation of a binary ultimately only has conservative results.

Those supporting ‘feminisms of difference’ would argue that this is where the actual reality of a distinct male and female body steps in; the same behaviour expressed by both a male and female body have different significances (meanings, effects) since it is the female body that is considered inferior to the male body (Gatens, 1991; Grosz, 1990). Thus differently gendered behaviours will mean different things when expressed by differently sexed bodies. The difference of the sexed body makes a difference. The shift from a politics of equality, so central to humanism and early feminism, to a politics of difference entails the recognition of the specificity of the female body but without implying some universal asocial female experience (Grosz, 1994a).

The above, although it acknowledges the social impact of physical difference, still keeps the sex/gender binary aligned with the biological/social binary. The sexed body remains a stable entity with an asocial biology. It is here that we feel Goldberg’s (2001) claims, his pursuit of cognitive/physical intimacy, can be pushed into service. As noted above, in tying difference in cognitive styles to brain morphology in the way he does, Goldberg enacts a biological/cultural distinction; brain variation if it cannot be cultural must then be genetic. This assumes that the influence of genetics can be neatly separated from that of society as though no constitutive interaction exists between them; an assumption which Fox Keller (2010) convincingly argues is a dubious one. Instead, if we were to adhere to the rigours of science and its need to account for all variation, should we not ask: If function intimately mirrors morphology and if, then, females have brain type x and males brain type y (distinct brain morphologies and, thus, functions), then why is there no perfect match between decision-making style and sex?

There seem to be two possible answers to the above question: 1) either function and morphology are not aligned, which then means that gender and sex are distinct and the traditional reading of the sex/gender binary is justified; or 2) Goldberg (2001) is mistaken in associating the two sexes with distinct morphologies; that is, that individual variation disrupts the pursuit of discrete group variations (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). It could be that we are not dealing here with such static and distinct sexual biologies, that if we accept the materialist notion that there is a profound intimacy between cognition and neurology, then the variation in cognition across the sexes indicates the variation of sex itself. In other words, it seems that we are either, conservatively, dealing with significant variation within the two sexes or, more radically, we are touching on a phenomenon that indicates the violence of utilising a sexual binary where bodily, specifically neural, morphology exceeds the constraints of two sexes.

To restate the above: We take seriously Goldberg’s points that morphology and functionality are intimately connected and that the emergent cortex is open to environmental sculpting. For us this has several consequences:

Variation in the environment will result in variation in cortical organisation.

There will always be variation indicated by the statistical analysis of data, even if the difference indicated is ‘robust and significant’. As Fausto-Sterling (2000: 138) points out: ‘even statistics can’t discipline the object of study into neatly sorted categories’; the brain is not without some say. It is in accounting for this variation in a context where cognitive and neural (mind and body) and social and corporeal intimacy is taken seriously that the sexual variation of the body that exceeds the sex binary is revealed. Enforcing a strict distinction in a landscape of difference is a violent act; even if that landscape shows a bimodal (as opposed to binary) distribution (Wilson, 2004). Furthermore, distinctions that retain an ahistorical and acultural biology fail to recognise the profound embeddedness and openness of the body (Fausto-Sterling, 2008). Variation reveals the vagueness of binary lines and the ideological nature of attempts to erase such subtleties.

That said, we need to make an equally important remark: The imposition of pure difference is just as violent in such a landscape. We justify this statement in the next section via a consideration of critical readings of the sex/gender binary.

Troubling the sex/gender distinction

Bartky (1988), Bordo (1998), Butler (1993) and Grosz (1994a, 1994b) are amongst those who have turned to Foucault as a resource to enable a radical rethinking of the sex/gender binary. This turn conceptualised the corporeal as a source of resistance to the contemporary socio-political order, a positioning of the body as a realm of revolutionary morphological possibilities. The Foucauldian argument that allows such a trajectory to emerge is that sex does not provide the ground, the pure foundation, upon and through which culture erects its variations. Instead sex itself must be understood as the effect of a particular socio-discursive regime, that of sexuality (Grosz, 1994a). It is this matrix of practices, discursive and otherwise, that gives rise to the conviction that humanity ontologically consists of dichotomously sexed bodies (Gatens, 1996). Sexuality here refers to the myriad of wishes, desires, practices and impulses that result in distinct morphologies, the evidently biological given reality of sex (Grosz, 1994a). The body becomes determinate via this process of social inscription, which retroactively creates the very surface it writes upon.

Here patriarchy is understood as a heterosexist matrix which fixes, circumscribes, limits and names the body into the binary of two sexes where one sex is positioned as superior, its supremacy enabled through the derogation of the other (Butler, 1993; Grosz, 1996). The traces of this social production are erased so as to locate sex as asocial and natural, a biological fact, resulting in bodies clearly meant for certain functions: production for men and reproduction for women (Gatens, 1996). What becomes hidden in this process is that there is no monolithic or single body but a pliable and plastic body, one whose capabilities show remarkable historical and social variation (Grosz, 1994a). The body is reconceived as a potential multiplicity, always insisting on alterity, capable of a plethora of possible becomings and ruptures that defy the containment and binary logics of any culture, patriarchal or otherwise (Grosz, 1994a). Given such a conceptualisation of corporeality, Gatens (1996) calls for a non-polarised engagement with difference, one that resists the conventional utilisation of binary impositions. Goldberg’s data could here be used as evidence for such defiance where cognitive-morphological variance defies binary simplicity.

Acknowledging such a profound level of social influence thus troubles the sex/gender binary by indicating that there can be no pure body; it is not possible to articulate a body that is pre-discursive, pre-embodied or pre-inscribed (Chanter, 2000; Hood-Williams, 1996). One will only ever find a body that is always already marked and formed by society. Such a counter intuitive understanding (Wilkinson, 1997) addresses itself directly to the material form of the body in a fundamental way. For some the acceptance of such a level of cultural formation indicates the redundancy of the concept of gender, since the body, now freed from its position as invariant ground, itself becomes the site of cultural expression (Gatens, 1996).

In contrast, Butler (1993) retains the sex/gender binary but challenges the foundational role of sex by inverting the dichotomy and instead placing gender in the primary role. This, however, is an articulation of a ‘general’ gender, one that precedes the conventional binary. Here, gender is a discursive apparatus which gives rise to the specific notion of gender, as traditionally inscribed on an originary sex (Hekman, 1998; Hughes and Witz, 1996). Sex is thus never distinct from the gender apparatus but is its effect. Accordingly, sex should not be the ground from which to launch enquiries but instead the very object of enquiry. Here, showing the influence of Foucault, Butler regards the body as an effect of power/knowledge formations (Hekman, 1998). What Butler (1993) emphasises in this framework is that matter should not be understood as a surface or site (the ground for action), but as the effect of a process of materialisation. The sexed body is not the result of a single defining act but emerges through a process of activity, the unrelenting reiteration of a heterosexist matrix through which the sexed body-subject emerges. Gender is thus regarded as a continuous re-establishment of a particular socio-political order that creates the illusion of a stable body. Grosz (1994a) speaks of a body whose identity is determined by what it does rather than what it is claimed to be. The identity of the body is the result of performativity; it is an enacted materiality (Blackman et al., 2008)

Since the heterosexist matrix creates sexed bodies through a process of circumscription in a realm of difference, it necessarily constitutes and simultaneously excludes various bodily morphologies, desires and ways of being in this process of definition (Butler, 1993). The certainty of the sexed body can only be brought about through a series of identifications and dis-identifications, the fixedness of sex can only come about through the creation of an outside, a realm of ‘non-bodies’ that continuously threatens to disrupt the heterosexual order. The stability of two sexes is thus an illusion since at its heart is an instability that must be kept at bay through the relentless (violent) reiteration of a heterosexist structure. This implies that the specificity of the body always emerges through a set of relationships; it is an effect of the play of difference. The body is thus understood as a signifier or, more accurately, a nexus of signification, whose meaning is enabled through its relationship to other signifiers (Welton, 1998).

Wilson’s (1998) critique of Butler’s deconstruction takes aim at gender theory in general; she argues that the notion of gender is founded on the exclusion of biology, thus positioning the latter as its natural other. That is, the notion of gender is possible or comes about through the exclusion of the biological or, more specifically, sex. Given that sex is a constitutive segregation it cannot then afterwards be unproblematically recouped or reinstated under a generalised notion of gender. For Wilson, there lies at the heart of gender theory more than simply a (politically useful) denaturalisation or recognition of social process but, rather, an anti-biological moment which then not only positions the biological as politically bankrupt or impotent but as the natural enemy of the emancipatory political agenda. Sex consequently remains an inert substance awaiting the supplementation of culture in order to gain critical potency. Any gender theory which then attempts a rapprochement with sex is always already limited by a binary which prevents it from exceeding its constitutive prejudice. Important here is that this implies that the biological, as that which exceeds the cultural, which is in itself a resource for the transformation of the critical agenda, is foreclosed.

In contrast, and relevant here to our reading of Goldberg’s text, Wilson (2004) demonstrates the political potency of the biological in her reading of Simon LeVay’s well-known research in which he claims the existence of significant and distinguishing size differences of the third interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus (INAH 3) between male homosexuals and heterosexuals. Wilson (2004: 53) notes a ‘fair degree of variation’ in his data where the data both clusters in a dimorphic (hetero/homo) pattern and produces measurements that trouble such a patterning. She notes the extensive and diverse critique of this research and particularly wishes to resist the call by some critics to oppose what is seen as the statistical (and ideological) imposition of a dimorphic pattern on a complex landscape more accurately typified by a ‘distributed logic’ (Wilson, 2004: 54), in other words, ‘the logic of the range is offered in order to replace or invalidate the logic of the divide’ (Wilson, 2004: 56). Instead, Wilson (2004: 56) argues for a logic that is neither that of the discrete (the binary) nor an ‘aimless pattern’, but rather ‘a reticulating pattern, a co-implication of the disseminated (ranging) with the dimorphic (divided)’. Here, neither pattern is excluded but each is understood as being in a complex generative and constraining relationship with the other. This enables the acknowledgement of the troubling and insistent presence of both, not as the interaction between two discrete positive phenomena, but a relationship where the two are ‘joined in sameness while separated in difference (Fortun, 2003, in Wilson, 2004: 58).

Thus LeVay’s and Goldberg’s data neither unproblematically accommodate the simplicity of the binary nor confirm the critical dream of the play of pure and subversive differences, but produce a dimorphic pattern marked by variation that relentlessly speaks back to both impositions. Schyfter (2007: 351) comments that Wilson’s reading indicates that neurology provides us with ‘both a limitless and constrained range of possibilities for sexuality’. We hope that our reading of Goldberg’s text provides a similar complexity for sex. Goldberg’s brain both affirms and troubles the notion of distinct decision styles, distinct brain morphologies and distinct sexes. It posits a body beyond conservative binaries and yet disinterested in confirming pure difference – a biology and sex always already ahead of ideological agendas.

Conclusion: Disrupting through neuroscience

Almost two decades ago, Fausto-Sterling (1993: 21) controversially argued against a ‘two-party sexual system’ for a gradated system, a ‘vast, infinitely malleable continuum’, of at least five sexes. The above reading both celebrates the radicality of her claim of continuous difference whilst keeping in play the disruption of the distinct morphological tendencies which she also acknowledges. The reading also demonstrates the importance of resisting the bio-phobia that haunts critical projects where biology is kept at a safe distance through gender/sex and other distinctions leaving the neurological body as inert, stable and apolitical. However, it does not seek to ahistorically pathologise this distinction, for we agree with Hood-Williams (1996: 1) that it has been ‘extremely useful both politically and theoretically’ and with Kimball (2007) that it has enabled feminist psychology. Nor do we wish to re-enact the errors of autonomy (pure categories) or reductionism (conflation) typical of utilisations of this binary (Chanter, 2000). Rather we join Chanter (2000: 1241) in placing gender and sex in a dynamic relation where distinctions between the realms are ‘not fixed and rigid but malleable and flexible’. This goes part of the way to acknowledging Wilson’s (1998) point that gender and sex are mutually contaminating and co-constitutive.

The reading articulated above is one attempt to address the prospect of a critical neuroscience, a sustained project that extends beyond being critical of neuroscience (though this is not a call for the erasure of such criticality) to being critical through neuroscience (reading its texts apart from and often against its ideological commitments). Our reading of a fragment of Goldberg’s work takes seriously a neural functional closeness commonly assumed by neuroscientists (LeDoux, 2002) – that is, that a change in the behaviour and experience of the organism is ‘accompanied’ by changes in the materiality of the neural landscape. We acknowledge the reductionist nature of this formulation, since it focuses on the neural and excludes the other systems that constitute the body, a shortcoming that Wilson (2004) has addressed in some of her work. Beyond this, our reading heeds the openness of Goldberg’s emergent cortices to environmental sculpting. Goldberg (1990: 267) sketches a being embedded in its environment in that its neural architecture shows an organisation contingent on both its immediate and historical experiences; a ‘resultant’ organism due to an ‘emergent’ neural architecture.

Our reading exploits this intimacy between the neural and the social, which is understood not as a simplistic instantaneous mirroring which then erases time and resistance (and thus the subject), but a relating through a set of resistances or sedimentations across time that confers on the biological an ‘agency’ of sorts. Through this it is possible to acknowledge a neural matter which both enables and accommodates the present but, since it also changes and operates across a variety of other temporalities, constrains what is possible (Connolly, 2002). This then does not attempt to reduce one aspect to the other (the social to the biological or vice versa) but, in systemic language, seeks to articulate a set of complex systems in complex relation to one another (Wilden, 1980), or, in a more Derridean discourse, one that recognises a non-foundation of systems of traces which troubles any attempt to indicate an essential difference or dominance between the biological and language (Royle, 2000).

Fausto-Sterling (2005) points out that the biology/social, nature/nurture, and sex/gender binaries, where the body belongs exclusively to the former in each pair, prevents us from seeing the profound effects that culture has on the corporeal. For us our (mis)reading of Goldberg’s (2001) text, in which his acknowledgement of functional-morphological and corporeal-environmental intimacy allows us to glimpse the variation of sex itself, also demonstrates the emancipatory limitations of a sex/gender distinction read as being equal to stability/variation and biology/culture. Biology too has agency, for as Kessler (1998: 132) in her study of intersexuality argued, ‘in the acceptance of genital variability and gender variability lies the subversion of both genitals and gender’. We would claim that in brain-function variation lies a further source of such subversion. In a type of ontology which acknowledges the materiality of both power and mind, does a reading of sex not become possible which both disrupts patriarchal utilisations of binaries and provokes those rejoicing over pure difference into acknowledging the co-constitutive moment through which both distinct morphology and disruptive variation emerge? In the radical moment revealed by reading neuroscience against the grain, are we not challenged to rethink sex, gender and biology and to discover our landscape afresh in the pursuit of new emancipatory, if not revolutionary, ideas?