Queering Human Neuroscience - what I understand by this is
the complication of a dichotomous sex/gender in neurosciences.
In this context I am interested in everything that is ambiguous.
I’m interested in the contrast of atypical patterns to typical patterns.
Normally we show typical patterns of women, typical patterns of men.
I’m not interested in the typical ones any more. We know enough about them.
I’m interested in the atypical ones, even if they’re in the minority.
That would be one understanding of Queering Biology.
I’d be interested in studies on people who don’t fit into this sex/gender norm
who aren’t defined by this sex/gender norm but have other kinds of sexes/genders,
so that we can also group them and say
“this group of these people has this or that activity or structure in their brains.”
And that’s part of Queering Neuroscience as well.
And also to represent this diversity, or variability as we call it in science,
which otherwise somehow gets ignored.
Queer Biology or Queer Neuroscience is also about criticism and meta-reflection.
Not just publishing empirical studies but also looking at neuroscience from outside
Examining neuroscience from outside and publishing on that.
For me, that also belongs to Queering Neuroscience, this meta-reflection –
and that is already part of my research:
the critical reflection on what other people do when they investigate sex/gender, sexuality etc.
And in this particular example I wanted to say that in my opinion,
that what we know in gender studies – which we have already known for a long time –
that it’s never just about sex/gender, but sex/gender is interwoven with other categories
and we can’t always separate them, there are interactions.
I picked out this study because it’s about the intersections between sex/gender and race,
and for example, the group who identified themselves as Black
they are shown material that is supposed to work as erotic stimuli – pictures –
And these erotic pictures were also categorized as
Black, African American; Latino or White Caucasian.
So there was a differentiation between the groups and these are intersections and categories
categories that we want in one way,
because we want to show that sex/gender is intersectional, also in studies like this,
and then in another way this is incredibly difficult, because, what are we doing here?
If we study participants, and group them as Black, Black American, Latino, White Caucasian etc.
we also select the picture material that we show them –
because we want to produce exactly this (erotic) activity in their brains –
by categorizing the pictures and matching them to the participants.
I think we still have a long way to go to work out:
“How can we do this without getting stuck in these categories?”
And I wanted to show this study firstly as an example of what happens,
– and this is part of my work – to reflect on what is going on when my colleagues publish.
And the other aspect is something I want to directly criticize about this study:
If we have these categories and do this kind of studies,
What is visualized in the publication? What is presented?
How is the story presented in this study? Because every publication is also a story,
a story, a dramatic composition.
And it’s interesting that what is presented, is the White – the “white man” here.
the white erotic stimuli and the anti-stimuli,
because it was about contrasting something especially stimulating
with something especially not stimulating.
And in both cases it was about what was presented.
And what was represented was: “the White”, “the normal”, the whatever.