Vanessa Bentley (University of Alabama, Birmingham)
Sex essentialism, a form of biological essentialism, is the view that the two sexes are essentially distinct; males and females have different biological essences that are a result of their sex. Sex essentialism as an assumption imposes methodological and theoretical limitations. The assumption is socially and ethically problematic because it naturalizes sex/gender differences and can be used to justify the oppression of women. Although the problem of sex essentialism in general is recognized by feminist critiques of science (Jordan-Young and Rumiati 2012, Fine 2013, Rippon et al. 2014), I focus on how sex essentialism affects experimental practice. I investigate two case studies in the neuroimaging of sex/gender differences and find that sex essentialism is pervasive. The first case study, comprising 45 articles, is on structural differences in the corpus callosum. The second case study, comprising 14 articles, is on functional activation differences in the mental rotation task. I find that, although many articles report differences, few articles find the same differences and most articles contradict each other. Thus, there is no evidence for consistent sex/gender differences in the size or shape of the corpus callosum or in the activation associated with mental rotation processing. However, despite the lack of consensus across studies, researchers treat sex/gender differences as empirically verified. Additionally, I find that researchers: 1) fail to consider evidence that contradicts their sex-essentialist theory; 2) fail to distinguish sex and gender, giving the impression that all differences are due to sex factors (biology, hormones, genetics, “nature”); 3) assume their results generalize across time and cultures; and 4) assume that experience doesn’t affect brain structure and function. Throughout, it is unclear if researchers explicitly avow sex essentialism or if they are ignorant of the assumption. I suggest a new framework for cognitive neuroscience that is better founded epistemologically and is more socially and morally responsible. This framework connects feminist standpoint empiricism (Intemann 2010) to the practice of cognitive neuroimaging. This includes: initiating inquiry from the perspective of women’s lives, reflecting on the differences between men’s lives and women’s lives, and incorporating the interests of women in the research.
