Description
Book SynopsisIn
The Brain's Body Victoria Pitts-Taylor applies feminist and critical theory to recent developments in neuroscience and new materialist social thought to demonstrate how the brain interacts with and is impacted by power, social structures, and inequality.
Trade Review"
The Brain’s Body’s relevance and importance lie not only in this re-positioning of affect in neuroscience, but also in that... it deeply challenges the very presuppositions of the science itself, and how they function, in a burgeoning discipline that codifies our bodies and mind more intricately than ever before." -- Promise Li * Hong Kong Review of Books *
"Rather than embrace research on brain plasticity as telling an agreeable tale of human freedom, flexibility, and adaptability, Pitts-Taylor considers findings that clearly
matter—the effects of childhood poverty on the neurological development of language systems—and shows just how entangled this research is with imaginings of social 'others.'" -- Steven Epstein * Los Angeles Review of Books *
"The Brain’s Body is one of those books so incredibly useful for the work it does to help us understand and describe where it is we are—at a historical juncture where the stakes of feminist scientific literacy and engagement are high." -- Angela Willey * International Feminist Journal of Politics *
"This book breaks new ground in feminist studies of neuroscience. ... [Pitts-Taylor] offers a glimpse of what social neuroscience might be if it took embodiment and social relationship seriously." -- Robyn Bluhm * American Journal of Sociology *
"As we continue to wrestle with how the brain informs our sociological awareness and investigation, we will look to
The Brain’s Body as a blueprint to help us untangle fully the sociological usefulness, uncertainties, and risks in exploring the relationships between our brains and sociality." -- Oliver Rollins * Contemporary Sociology *
"Resonates . . . in its aim to bring a deeper political awareness to neuroscience by making difference and variation a central tenant. . . . Should be read carefully and thought about yet more carefully." -- Stephen T. Casper * Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences *
"Pitts-Taylor expertly navigates both the politically dangerous and redemptive qualities of current neuroscientific understandings of the relationship between brain, body, and society. . . . The connections she makes among a diverse body of interdisciplinary scholarship is no small feat, and more than anything reveals the importance of evolutionary ontogeny for understanding relations between brain, body, and society not as fixed and deterministic, but as plastic and contingent." -- Brandon Jones * New Genetics and Society *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction: The Social Brain and Corporeal Politics 1
1. The Phenomenon of Brain Plasticity 17
2. What Difference Does the Body Make? 43
3. I Feel Your Pain 67
4. Neurobiology and the Queerness of Kinship 95
Conclusion: The Multiplicity of Embodiment 119
Notes 129
References 153
Index 177
