Neurosexism, Neurofeminism, and Neurocentrism: From Gendered Brains to Embodied Minds

Abstract

Over the course of the last decade, a strand of feminist science scholarship has come together under the rubric of “neurofeminism”. One of the driving concerns for scholars in this area is to expose and criticize what is sometimes called “neurosexism”. This is a tendency among some neuroscientists, science writers and journalists to exaggerate cognitive, emotional, and behavioural sex differences and to pin gender stereotypes on allegedly innate sex differences of brain structure and function. The standard neurofeminist response has operated largely within the framework of the nature vs. nurture problematic, emphasizing the lack of attention to the role played by experience-dependent neuroplasticity in the development of a gendered brain. I propose to reframe this debate using resources from the philosophy of mind. I argue that several issues driving this debate hinge on the more fundamental question of how the role of the brain in behaviour should be conceptualized. In this regard, I show how neurosexism assumes neurocentrism—which I explicate as the transposition of the Cartesian immaterial soul onto the material brain—as its philosophical foundation, and I develop the case against this assumption, drawing in part on the enactive approach to the philosophy and science of the mind.