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DOI: 10.1177/0959353513503989
2013 23: 569 Feminism & Psychology
Dafne Muntanyola Saura
Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom (eds) science
Neurofeminism: Issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive

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prompt discussion among students in social work or mental health practitioner
programs. One of the most useful aspects of this section is the ethics of resistance,
which serves as a call to action for all psychologists to be continuously vigilant to
the organizational and societal pressures aecting their work.
In summary, Magnusson and Marecek have created an excellent resource for
psychologists seeking to incorporate gender and culture into their understanding of
psychology. They inspire readers to rethink the importance of the social context
culture in peoples experiences. Students will gain both conceptual and methodo-
logical insights from the accessible and engaging chapters.
Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom (eds), Neurofeminism: Issues at the
intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science. Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2012; 296 pp.
ISBN 978-0-230-29673-2.
Reviewed by: Dafne Muntanyola Saura, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain
Are we looking at a re-feminization of neuroscience? The inclusion of neurobiolo-
gist Kay Tye in Natures last Women in Science volume (30 Something Science
March 2013) seems to point in this direction. Being one of the hottest elds in
science, looking closer into the scientic kitchen might gives us key insights into the
relationship between doing gender and doing science. A key guide to this process is
Neurofeminism, a collection of 11 essays on the critical relationship between fem-
inist theory and neuroscience. The authors, including the editors of the volume
Robyn Bluhm, Anne Jaap Jacobson and Heidi Lene Maibom, come from the
disciplines of Philosophy, Psychology and Women Studies, with some being neuro-
scientists, biologists and engineers. The essays are not divided into sections but
gather around key themes such as terminology, ethics, philosophy of science and
embodiment. The heterogeneity of topics and authors makes it a dicult read at
times, and reiterations are inevitable. Rather than going through the essays from
A to Z, readers will probably pick the authors they want to read selectively, just
like reading poetry. The bibliography, which has been merged at the end of the
book, is up to date and of extreme value for students and academics who wish to
understand the state of the art of feminist cognitive science.
Neuroscience is rmly based on naturalistic research methods such as psycho-
logical experimentation, brain imaging and stimulation (EEG, MEG, fMRI, TMS)
and mathematical modelling. As Letitia Meynell puts forward in The Politics of
Pictured Reality, fMRI and other tools such as 3D foetal ultrasound produce
images that are only apparently transparent. Scientists rely heavily on sophisticated
machinery for observation and analysis that shape the production of results. The
adoration of the image impregnated already the birth of photography as an artistic
discipline, as well as that of lm. The historical confrontation between the realistic
and the fantastic use of media traditionally downplays the need for articiality in
taking the picture, independently of the content of the nal object. The current
manifestation of this cultural desire of visualizing anything is called in this volume
Book reviews 569
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neuro-voyeurism (p. 141), applied specically to the need for images of the brain.
In the laboratory, the aura of technology implies epistemic authority, which is also
socially constructed. While fMR images are visually attractive, they represent two
objects, the female brain and the male brain, that do not exist as physical realities
outside the world of statistical averages.
Following Meynell, Variation is noise (p. 15), and thus Ginger Gomans
Neurosciences and Gender Dierences shows how basic axioms of statistics are
not taken into account. She presents a study published in Cognitive Science
(Price and Friston, 2002) that illustrates how variation among individual brains
is higher than dierences between grouped female/male brains, which makes
gender an irrelevant discrimination factor from the statistical point of view. The
small number of subjects who are the basis for such fMRI studies make results
unreliable, according to representativity based on sample size. Goman decon-
structs the claim that there is enough neuro-data to prove the existence of perman-
ent, innate and hard-wired gender dierences. In fact, the high plasticity of the
brain and the importance of environmental factors counterbalance the most
common myths in neuroscience journals. Numerous examples in psychology and
cognitive science, such as Hyde (2005) in this volume and Kirsh and Maglio (1995)
show how cognitive skills improve with practice. Expert video players increase their
mental rotation abilities through embodied interactions with their environment,
regardless of gender. They are successful in the renement of their epistemic
actions. As for hardwiring, as Rebecca Jordan-Young and Raaella Rumiati put
forward later in this volume, it constitutes an unethical metaphor because it says
what is, it must be (p. 115), an attitude that translates the psychological need for
an organized environment and social order rather than the construction of a good
research question. Here we see how the feminist model takes into account the moral
and social dimension of doing science, which is a standpoint that is not part of
mainstream neuroscience. Several contributions point to the fact that the peer-
review system favours the publication of experimental results showing dierences
rather than gender similarities in brain behaviour. The dynamics of peer reviewing
might as well take part in the choice of method.
Moreover, as social scientists learn early in their career, correlations are not
causal relations. If data extracted from Facebook statuses by African-American
teenagers who declare a sexual preference for men also like basketball, what does
this correlation say about race, sexuality and sports? Looking at these data, noth-
ing relevant is being said, despite the fact that the empirical object has been widely
constructed and distributed on the web as Big Data results. Current developments
of big data science should make us hyperaware of the danger of believing in juxta-
position of information as the basis for real knowledge. Isabelle Dussage and
Anelis Kaiser label the jump of mainstream neuroscience from structure to func-
tion a product of reication. An example of an old-fashioned case of neuroscience
is that of brain-organization theory, where pre-natal sex dimorphism is taken as
evidence for dierences in later gendered behaviour. As dened by Pylyshyn (2003),
reication amounts to taking an event type (such as dierences in hormone expos-
ure in the womb) as an event token (dierences in individual gender behaviour).
570 Feminism & Psychology 23(4)
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Hardwired determinism is a direct consequence of this type of scholastic fallacy,
which happens in other domains in cognitive science, such as in analytical ration-
ality, where Cartesian dualism is the rule. Vidal (2009) quoted by Dussage and
Kaiser uses the term brainhood to label the ideology that equates brain and self,
subjectivity with neurons. The dominant brain organization paradigm follows this
social reductionism.
Following a similar epistemic road, Deboleena Roy moves from the context of
discovery to that of justication. She discusses the politics of representation from
an intersubjective point of view. Roy proposes slowing down as scientists and
looking for alternatives that would put to use old tools and designs together
with new research questions. These same authors look into task-based experiments,
such as Baron Cohens (2005) where the choice of toys or games that the partici-
pants are asked to play with respond to the researchers gender attributions of what
is considered feminine or masculine. The toddlers preference for dolls was con-
sidered feminine, while choosing construction sets was considered as a masculine
attitude. In all, social constructs derived from the researchers tools, stereotypes
and experimental designs permeate neuroscience laboratories.
I believe Gillian Einsteins account of her research on Female Genital Cutting
(FGC) escapes common reication and is a brilliant alternative to mainstream
neuroscience. By establishing an interdisciplinary object and combining tools
from the social sciences and neuroscience, she re-denes her object of research
and opens new directions for neuroscience itself. Her deconstruction starts by
breaking the traditional view of biology as being about something frozen and
structured: Biology is complex, messy and richly various, like real life
(Medawar, p. 149). The paradigm shift is again from a reied view of the reality
of neurons to the more complete and interdisciplinary view of variation in individ-
ual and social behaviour. By doing situated neuroscience, that is, by combining the
subjective accounts of Somali women who have gone through FGC, with objective
physical examinations of the genital area, she comes up with the idea that a possible
neurological outcome of FGC is a phantom clitoris. She thus puts forward how no
one has actually mapped female body regions to areas in the brain. Her questions
are not restricted to the amputation itself but include the chronic experiences of
pain, body mobility and skin oversensitivity, since the world writes on the whole
body. Her research demands a new understanding of the concept of pain, a bodily
sensation with strong narrative and social grounds.
When authors from pop neuroscience picture women as unique brain-body-
behaviour systems, they are ignoring the social nature of the embodied mind. It
is at the level of the social system that women and men negotiate work family
balance in their everyday lives, through work, pleasure, love and creativity.
Feminist neuroscience counters pop neuroscience, which is how Robyn Bluhm
names the best sellers that locate womens agency in a brain that is separate
from the body. Another example is Naomi Wolfs last book, which locates the
female agency in a particular genital area, the vagina. By naturalizing gender
stereotypes and reducing gender issues to communication conicts (such as in
Why Men Dont Listen and Women Cant Read Maps), gender inequality becomes
Book reviews 571
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less political, as Cynthia Krauss puts forward. The responsibility for changing
discrimination against women at work, or unfair domestic share of household
tasks, falls into the hands of women who have to deal with essentially dierent
and problematic biological equipment.
Popular narratives on womens identities counter the contemporary cognitive
science take on how we think. Cognition never happens in isolation and it is always
interactive. The body, in the words of Andy Clark, is the locus of willed action, the
point of sensory-motor conuence, the gateway to intelligent ooading (2008, p.
207). Human cognition is not the innate, monolithic, deterministic, genetic and
individual process that mainstream neuroscience and pop neuroscience seem to
picture. As claimed in the introduction to this volume The social nature of the
embodied mind starts early and perhaps even precedes birth (p. 8). The brain is a
plastic, situated and exible organic entity that interacts constantly with the phys-
ical, cultural and social environment. Most importantly, and here is where soci-
ology, anthropology, social psychology and other disciplines that are not part of
this volume could contribute, these changes happen not only at the biological or
the psychological level but also at the social level. The outcome of my reading is
that variation, in science as well as in gender, is here to stay.
Christine Horrocks and Sally Johnson (eds), Advances in health psychology critical approaches.
Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke, 2012; 230 pp. ISBN 9780230275386 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Carmel Capewell, The University of Northampton, UK
The focus of this book is looking at how critical health psychology can lead to
action and, with it, social change. The contributors all have an interest in health,
mainly using qualitative methods in participative and community projects with
marginalised groups. Some take an explicitly feminist perspective in their research.
Moving away from the traditional bio-psychological model of health psychology,
the book emphasises the scholar-activist role enabling a focus on social and con-
textual issues. The critical approaches in health psychology incorporate the context
in which individuals live their lives and the impact this has on health behaviour.
This is in contrast with the traditional health psychology approach which decon-
texualises individual health behaviours and cognition.
Most of contributions to the book emerge from the British Healthcare System
(NHS). The book is arranged in four sections. In Part I, contributors provide
background on the development and value of critical health psychology.
The authors do not deny the place and worth of traditional health psychology
but do advance the benets of an alternative approach. Part II explores in more
detail the interactions between individual health decisions and actions through
exploring the social, cultural, gender and situational contexts within which such
decisions take place. Detailed consideration is given to how people need to be
situated in a wider context if health behaviours and responses to health prevention
campaigns are to be of use. Participants voices provide clear examples of the
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