Damian Sendler: According to Intersectionality, the social structures that lead to inequality need to be examined in research, and that sex/gender is a component of other social categories. When it comes to studying social group memberships, neuroscientific research has tended to overlook this powerful and important perspective. Neurofeminism, a branch of critical neuroscience that challenges sexist assumptions, methods, and interpretations of data in the field of neuroscience, has largely ignored intersectionality. In contrast, for more than a decade, psychologists have been studying intersectionality. Neurofeminism’s potential new research avenues are examined in light of how intersectionality has advanced feminist psychology. Intersectionality serves as a framework for identifying three main research topics. Intersectionality research aims to challenge psychological epistemologies by focusing on the social structural causes of health inequalities experienced by people with intersecting marginalized social identities. The second theme is research on the psychological processing of social group memberships that underlies systemic discriminatory practices. We examine the potential advantages and disadvantages of advancing an intersectionality-informed neurofeminism by drawing on parallels between the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
Damian Jacob Sendler: Neurofeminism is the practice and critique of neuroscientific research by and for feminists. When researchers treat neuroscientific knowledge as if it were apolitical, culturally neutral, and sexually dichotomous, they are reinforcing the idea of sexism (Kuria and Hess, 2011; Bluhm et al., 2012; Schmitz and Hoppner, 2014). Rather than relying on the traditional sex/gender1 neuroscience paradigm to study these issues, neurofeminists have developed new conceptual (e.g. the mosaic brain) and methodological (e.g., brain size correction) approaches to the field of sex/gender research. In addition to providing context for the field of neuroscience, these contributions (Fine, 2010; Roy, 2012; Jordan-Young and Karkazis, 2019) acknowledge the constraining role of sexed/gendered experiences in shaping sex/gender development (Fausto-Sterling, 2021), address the role of sex/gender in brain structure and function (Eliot, 2011), and recognize that sex and gender are fundamentally intertwined (Kaiser, 2012). Neurofeminism has made an important contribution by exposing the methodological and conceptual biases in neuroscientific research that claims that sex/gender differences in behavior are fundamental and caused by “hard-wired” differences between the brains of men and women (Fine, 2012; Joel and Vikhanski, 2019; Jordan-Young and Karkazis, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Eliot et al., 2021). Furthermore, it was proven, independent of the assigned sex or gender at birth, that specific behaviors associated with gender (e.g. aggressiveness increases testosterone and nurturing behaviors decreases testosterone; van Anders and Gray, 2015) can induce hormonal change, supporting the idea that sex-based biological differences, if any, are influenced by sociocultural differences such as behavioral expression. In the end, neurofeminists have made numerous recommendations regarding epistemological assumptions, language use, postcolonial constraints, and the categories and research methods used to conduct sex/gender-related neuroscientific investigations (Einstein, 2012; Kuria, 2014; Rippon et al., 2014; Roy, 2018; Duchesne et al., 2020).
Dr. Sendler: There is still a long way to go for feminist approaches to sex/gender-related neuroscientific research because national funding agencies have encouraged sex-segregated research (as discussed in Eliot and Richardson, 2016; Joel and McCarthy, 2017; Gungor et al., 2019). According to National Institutes of Health (NIH) guidelines, researchers must now account for sex as a biological variable (SABV) in all stages of their research (design, analysis, and reporting) in vertebrate animals as well as humans. Currently, there are many calls for SABV-based neuroscience (e.g., Bale and Epperson, 2017; Bath, 2020; Bhargava et al., 2021; Shansky and Murphy, 2021). Recent years have seen an increase in feminist scholars advocating for bioscience researchers to engage with intersectionality as a theoretical framework2 that could aid in creating socially contextualized, reflective biological knowledge, providing an alternative narrative to other essentialist and risk-oriented explanations in biomedicine (for a review, Hankivsky et al., 2017; DeBlaere et al., 2018; Shattuck-Heidorn and Richardson, 2019; Jacke and Palm, 2020). Research on gender and sexuality in the brain has largely ignored intersectionality in its design, analysis, and interpretation to date. We examine whether and how intersectionality can provide new research avenues for neuroscience, and in particular for neurofeminism, as this special topic aims to advance the development of critical investigative approaches in sex/gender and the brain that are grounded in plurality.
Intersectionality is a theoretical framework that states that sex/gender and other discriminatory social categories are intertwined (Shields, 2008; DeBlaere et al., 2018; Mays and Ghavami, 2018). Intersectionality, as a theoretical framework, was first articulated in qualitative legal research to deconstruct the sexed/gendered experiences of African American women (Crenshaw, 1989, 1990). It now informs research across several disciplines that investigates various processes involved in experiences of social injustice arising from intersecting group memberships (e.g., De Vita et al., 2016). Intersectionality has influenced sex/gender research in psychology for more than a decade (Shields, 2008). The literature on intersectionality has grown, and there has been a lot of debate about which conceptual, methodological, and epistemological approaches to conducting psychological research best align with an intersectionality framework (McCormick-Huhn et al., 2019; Bowleg and Bauer, 2016; Scott and Siltanen, 2017).
Current sex/gender-related neuroscientific research lacks a thorough understanding of the intersectionality of social group memberships, and instead treats sex/gender as an independent category. A commitment to understanding the interdependence of social group memberships beyond conventional factorial interactive analyses of interdependence of social group memberships is required to adopt an intersectional perspective. A wide range of psychological research is used in this paper to examine the advantages and disadvantages of using intersectionality in neuroscience. There are three distinct research themes in psychology, each of which uses intersectionality in a different way. Using intersectionality as a starting point in psychological research aims to better understand the socio-structural factors that contribute to health disparities among people who belong to multiple social groups. As a second method, intersectionality is used to examine the psychological processing of social group memberships that underlie the implementation of systemic discriminatory practices. For the third approach uses intersectionality to examine how psychological knowledge is produced and understood in order to challenge epistemology in psychology.. Neuroscientific research that is informed by intersectionality will be compared to each research theme.
Individuals with marginalized intersecting social identities face a variety of health inequities, which psychological research informed by intersectionality seeks to identify. The social layouts of a society are defined as the social structures that emerge from and constrain the actions of people, resulting in the classification of individuals in groups through normative sets of roles, functions, meaning, purpose, and power dynamics for each individual. (Haslanger, 2016). Laws, policies and practices; economic characteristics; occupations; familial organization all have an impact on society as a whole because of socio-structural factors. When conducting psychological research that aims to (1) expose the complexity of oppressive social structures related to group membership and (2) understand the health ramifications of such structures, various quantitative and qualitative methodologies are used. Instead of considering social group membership categories as separate entities, this type of research looks at the interdependence of rather than the independence of factors such as race, class, and sex/gender to examine populations that are often overlooked in major analyses and frameworks for health inequality (Bowleg, 2008; Warner, 2008). Furthermore, this method’s interpretation of research results focuses on taking concrete steps toward social change and justice equality. All in all, this type of psychology is guided by an understanding of oppressive socio-structural power dynamics in order to produce psychological knowledge about health inequalities that is contextualized within an understanding of oppressive socio-structural power dynamics in order to dismantle these inequalities in health outcomes (Bowleg, 2008).
According to a recent study by Kteily-Hawa et al. (2019), such studies are critical for elucidating the complex interactions between social categories and health outcomes (Kteily-Hawa et al., 2019). South Asian women living with HIV in Canada were the focus of this study, which examined the impact of oppressive social structures associated with immigration on the health of these women. According to the authors’ findings, there is an increased risk of HIV infection due to factors such as gendered roles, power dynamics, emotional ties, social norms, and other factors (Kteily-Hawa et al., 2019). Men’s dominance over domestic labor was reinforced by gender roles within households, and these dynamics were reinforced further by the experience of migration. Furthermore, English and colleagues (2020) studied socio-structural factors that influence psychological health and health behavior outcomes among Black sexual minority men (SMM) and found that incarceration history, recent police arrest, and experiences of discriminatory treatment by law enforcement all interact to predict sexual behaviors related to HIV risk, psychological distress, the desire to seek prophylactic treatment for HIV and the likelihood of obtaining HIV treatment (English et al., 2020). For example, when data on Black SMM are combined with that of Black heterosexual men or White SMM, their particular experiences in prison and with law enforcement, as well as their associated health risks, tend to be overlooked, making Black SMM an intersectionally invisible group. An investigation of the Black SMM community’s experiences with law enforcement has shown that prior incarceration and discrimination by law enforcement, as well as recent arrest, have all been linked to poorer psychological health outcomes. This type of intersectionality research provides an understanding of health inequality that is directly linked to power dynamics, and it offers an approach to studying health and wellness that has the potential to promote social change.
To be clear, intersectionality research that examines health outcomes in relation to broad, decontextualized social categories differs significantly from other kinds of health research. Intersectionality studies that focus solely on broad social categories (e.g., sex/gender, race/class) without any consideration of socio-structural or other contextual factors (e.g., discrimination) are referred to as “flattened” intersectionality (Warner et al., 2016). This latter type of research avoids dealing with the “latent” issue of inherent socio-structural oppression, and thus does not address the “latent” issue of socio-historical oppression. When intersectionality is viewed from a “flattened” perspective, the individual is placed at the center of attention. As a result of this shift in focus, the socio-structural power imbalances that underlie health inequality are overlooked. It’s possible to reinforce oppressive structures by obfuscating the role they play in mental health issues or other health-related phenomena when social categories are decontextualized and sociopolitical structures are removed. This is known as flattened intersectionality research (Mackenbach, 2005, for example) (examples reviewed in Buchanan and Wiklund, 2021). “Mainstream psychology” has been blamed by Buchanan and Wiklund (2021) on exclusionary epistemic practices for a large portion of contemporary intersectionality research in psychology (epistemology is further discussed in section III; Buchanan and Wiklund, 2021). Intersectionality research, on the other hand, places a greater emphasis on tracing the roots of health inequity in social systems rather than relying on simplistic explanations that ignore the complexities of social structures that can be both liberating and oppressive.
Research on the neural effects of health disparities tends to focus on a single group of participants. For example, neuroscientists frequently examine the neural correlates of social class, or more specifically, poverty. Numerous correlations between SES and brain development and function have been found in such studies (Hackman and Farah, 2009; McDermott et al., 2019). The research, while describing the neurological effects on the brain of oppressive economic conditions, tends to “detach” the social experiences and consequences of poverty from their oppressive socio-political context and does not consider their interdependence with other social group memberships. This kind of neuroscientific research inadvertently promotes essentialist and deterministic interpretations of brain data, like the flattened intersectionality research described above. Most of the studies I reviewed suggest that the effects of social inequality can become entrenched in our brains, influencing our future neurobiological, cognitive, and even our socioeconomic trajectories. Thus, the phenotype is made to be “realized and fixed” (Pitts-Taylor, 2019). Researchers run the risk of reinforcing the view that poverty persists because of cognitive “inferiority” rather than as a complex outcome resulting from numerous sources of social inequality if socio-structural factors are not taken into consideration.
In a population with multiple marginalized group memberships, only one neuroscientific study has examined the role of socio-structural context. SES in childhood and race/ethnic discrimination were linked to structural differences in the brain, as well as poorer learning and memory performance, according to Thames et al. (2018). (Thames et al., 2018). Despite the study’s broad scope, it found that in HIV-infected populations, the intersection of race and class-based structural oppression is linked to neural and cognitive impairments. For neurofeminists’ critical analysis of neuroscience, critical race analysis must be considered in any investigation aiming to understand and ultimately dismantle inequitable sexe/gendered conditions (Roy, 2012; Kuria, 2014; Rippon et al., 2014), and as our discussion demonstrates, research in neuroscience that is informed by intersectionality must expand its focus beyond sex/gender and race to include a wider spectrum of intersecting and marginalized groups.’ Aside from a pain study conducted with Somali-Canadian women who have been subjected to female genital cutting, there are no neurofeminist parallels to this research to date” (Fitsch et al., 2020).
In light of these findings, how can neurofeminist work benefit from intersectionality? First and foremost, it is critical to recognize that sex/gender is a social construct that is intertwined with other social group memberships. Second, research with populations of women and people of sex/gender diversity should be given more attention because of their marginalized group memberships. There is still a lack of research in this area, and it risks reinforcing oppressive social structures by ignoring their impact on health, as has been mentioned earlier. Identifying the specific socio-structural power dynamics that may contribute to or explain previously observed sex- and gender-related brain health inequalities is critical for neurofeminists in their research. After identifying these socio-structural dynamics, researchers can start operationalizing measures that can be incorporated into neuroscientific research designs for socio-structural factors, policies and practices, occupations, laws, family organization, racial minority status, and economic characteristics. In order to advance neurofeminism, we need to go beyond what has been articulated in neuroscience to date in order to take this important first step. It’s imperative that scholars consider the socio-historical context of oppression and privilege when selecting methodology or an analytical approach (discussed further in section III). Using intersectionality in sex/gender neuroscience research will help us better understand health outcomes, rather than focusing on individual risk factors.
Rather than focusing solely on individual risk, we explored the role of intersectionality as a conceptual framework for analyzing health inequality as a systemic phenomenon rooted in oppressive socio-structural imbalances of power. Following that, we’ll take a look at studies that examine the psychological processes by which oppressive attitudes and behaviors can arise in social structures.
When it comes to social categories that overlap, how do people process and comprehend information? Quantitative methodologies are used in another area of intersectional psychology research to examine how information processing related to different social categories may contribute to social discrimination. The primary focus of this study is on the representation of intersecting social identities in the study’s stimulus bank rather than in the sample of participants themselves. In other words, the development of the research question is guided by intersectionality, while the study design, analysis, and interpretation of data are based on traditional psychological approaches.
Intersectionality in psychology meant that racialized or sexed/gendered variables were no longer considered independent stimuli. Race recognition and later “racial bias” research has been extensively studied using this type of categorization, in which the goal was to measure the relative contributions of automatic (i.e., unconscious or unintentional) and controlled (i.e., conscious or deliberate) processing to a racialized phenomenon of study (Dasgupta and Greenwald, 2001). To understand “fundamental” processes, much of this research (and psychological science in general) implicitly assumes that these processes are universal across individuals. Assumptions of universality are reflected in the use of samples of homogeneously Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democrats. Findings from this type of research, which focuses on how “in general” psychological processes can be understood without regard to the socio-structural context, can be seen as a partial bind to a normative population and a support for the unequal power dynamics of existing societal structures, despite its potential contributions to our understanding of discrimination’s psychological processes.
These early studies focused on the interplay between racial identity and sex/gender identity, using pictures of faces, in factorial designs where each category is treated separately. Goff et al. (2008) conducted a groundbreaking study in which participants were shown images of female and male faces in both black and white. As a result, the perceivers classified Black men and Black women as more masculine than their White counterparts in terms of sex/gender. In addition, ratings of masculinity moderated the effect of race on the perceived attractiveness of Black women compared to White women’s faces. Over the years, more research has been done using different racialization methods, target populations, and participant ages to see how face-based judgments are affected by all of these factors. For example: Johnson et al. (2012) and Hopper et al. (2014) have all used different racialization methods (Kim et al., 2015; Li and Tse, 2016; Lei et al., 2020). Figure 1 illustrates the exclusion of Black women from Stolier et al(2017) .’s face stimuli visualization, which shows a clear bias in favor of white women in sex/gender-related social cognition research based on a white majority (82 percent) of participants. An important lesson to be learned from this study is that it must be conducted and presented in a way that takes into account other social realities in order to properly account for the complexities of how people perceive their sexual orientation and gender identity (Goff and Kahn, 2013).
Damian Jacob Markiewicz Sendler: Methods that aim to integrate how social group memberships are processed and experienced are currently being developed in this area of psychology. These new multiracial face databases reflect both the impact of intersectionality in face processing (Chaney et al. 2020; Chen et al., 2021), as well as the consequences of diversification in psychological samples. While this is true, it does not address socio-structural power dynamics; rather, it simply summarizes descriptively the very processes of discrimination for which it attempts to provide elucidation ps. What is considered “masculine” and what is considered “attractive” are strongly informed by the socio-structural power dynamics that are commonly overlooked in these kinds of studies.
Damian Sendler
Another option is to use intersectionality to study the psychological processes at play in people’s actual experience (as opposed to perception) of multiple social identities colliding at one point in time. A study by Chaney et al. (2020) found that threat and safety cues can be transferred from the racial to the sex/gender category, meaning that Black and Latina women expected both racial and sex/gender discrimination from an identity threat stimulus that was designed to terrify them about their own racial and sex/gender identity (Chaney et al., 2020). Similar to this, the sense of security one feels when presented with an identity safety cue is transferred to another category. This research reveals the psychological consequences of power imbalance in social inequality by demonstrating how intersecting marginalized social identities (e.g., the experience of threat or safety) confer disadvantage and advantage (e.g., in the context of the social situation). It is hoped that this research will lead to better social interventions and advocacy policies by providing evidence and new tools for better representation of social group membership diversity (e.g. databases).
Neuroscientific approaches to facial processing and decision-making have a lot of research, but it hasn’t been influenced by intersectionality. Neuronal correlates of “social categories” (Wiese et al., 2008; George, 2016; Stolier and Freeman, 2017; Delplanque et al., 2019; Brooks et al., 2020; Delplanque et al., 2019) have been studied in the past, but these studies have focused on the neural correlates of a single construct such as sex/gender, racial categorization, race-related prejudice or sex/gender stereotyping (e.g., Kaul et al., 2011; Senholzi et al., 2015; Mattan et al., 2018; Fisher et al., 2020). Only one study has examined the neural correlates of face processing of multiple social group memberships so far, to the best of our knowledge. our knowledge.
As Stolier and Freeman (2016) argue in their paper “Neural pattern similarity reveals the inherent intersection of social categories,” facial recognition is “inherently intertwined” with social categories like sex/gender, race, and emotion expression. In their behavioral and fMRI experiments, they found that participants’ social-conceptual knowledge of identity-related stereotypes influences both their subjective perception and neural representation of social categories. Emotional categorization, for example, classified black faces as angry, while female faces were more likely to be labeled happy. Social categories’ subjective interdependence was also reflected in differences in brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and right fusiform cortex. These social categories’ intertwined aspects at the neural level were not fully explained by visual similarity of image silhouettes or pixel-intensity. This suggests that subjective, social-conceptual knowledge underlies this brain processing. There is a link between social inequality and the neurobiology of face perception, according to the findings of this study.
Both the advantages and disadvantages of so-called “intersectional” research are clearly illustrated by the work of Stolier and Freeman (2016). As a result of the authors’ conclusion that socially conditioned stereotypes influence the way the brain processes faces, the study avoids the pitfalls of biological essentialism while still placing an emphasis on how the brain processes faces in relation to social categories that intersect. Their findings “are mute with respect to the origins of stereotypical associations studied here,” and the authors suggest that these could be the result of cultural transmission or implicit learning (Stolier and Freeman, 2016, p. 797). Rather than questioning whether these subjective stereotypes are “fixed” at the level of the brain or whether they can be changed, they suggest that future studies should aim to manipulate participant’s social stereotypes in order to improve causal inference. In addition, they do not discuss how socio-structural power dynamics may influence the development of stereotypical social categorization, thus treating each of the categories as “neutral.”” Consequently, even if the research aims to locate distinct patterns of neural activity related to intersectional categories in the brain, it runs the risk of inadvertently biologically essentializing these categories, simply in a more multifaceted, “intersectional” manner than arises from the “traditionally” separated social categories. One reason neurofeminists have avoided the topic of intersectionality thus far may be due to this major stumbling block (Fitsch et al., 2020). However, despite these drawbacks, Stolier and Freeman’s work is still an important contribution to the neurofeminist field because it supports the constitutive role of social experiences, in particular intersecting social group membership, in the subjective perception and neural processing of faces and emphasizes that processing of intersectionality is not solely stimulus-driven.
Is it possible that neurofeminism could benefit from this kind of study? For this type of research to be effective, it must take into account the interdependence of intersecting identity categories within the context of socio-structural power dynamics. Researchers and participants must be aware of the relationship between social group membership and the corresponding power differences. Sex/gender, race, and emotion are not neutral, independent categories within or between social groups. As a result of adopting an approach like that of Chaney et al. (2020), we can better understand the context-contingency of group membership processing. Finally, new research could shed light on the brain’s processing of sex/gender by manipulating social group stereotypes and social power dynamics, as suggested by Stolier and Freeman.
Intersectionality in research on social group memberships can open up new research directions in the neuroscience of sex and gender, as we show in this section.. Read more.. However, the incorporation of intersectionality into this research does not come without significant flaws. Critical neurofeminism may not be able to engage in this type of research without risking biological essentialization of “intersected” categories because of the difficulties in reconciling an inherently reductive, quantitative approach to producing generalizable knowledge about the brain. In the following section, we examine whether or not psychology or neuroscience can accommodate an intersectionality perspective at the epistemological level without accidentally expanding notions of biological essentialism through harmful dimension reduction of social categories in the brain.
Intersectionality is used in a third type of research to examine psychology’s epistemologies. Although it is possible to use intersectionality to guide the selection and interpretation of research findings (theme 1), here it is used instead to critically interrogate psychology’s foundational principles of knowledge production (theme 2). The intersectionality perspective on knowledge production sees the production of knowledge as a dynamic, ever-changing process that is shaped by social dynamics, power dynamics, and personal experiences (Marecek, 2016; Else-Quest and Hyde, 2016a, b; Grzanka, 2018; Collins, 2019; Rice et al., 2019). Following in the footsteps of other feminist scientists and philosophers (Haraway, 1984; Longino, 1987; Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Schiebinger, 2001; Harding, 2006; Hammonds and Herzig, 2008; Subramaniam, 2009). “Knowledge” is defined in this way, which makes the knower’s social position a part of the process of knowing (Anderson, 2020). Knowledge is a product of a person’s social position, and this position influences how empirical inquiry can or should take place in a given knowledge domain. Unlike the positivist epistemologies that have dominated much of psychological science, this idea argues that scientific findings can only be supported by “facts” derived from the scientific method, and only observable evidence can be used to support legitimate knowledge claims. When this assumption and its related practices are disrupted, new avenues for psychology can be discovered (Warner et al., 2016).
According to a recent publication by Settles et al. (2020), an intersectional and psychological perspective on knowledge production has significant epistemological gaps. The conceptual ruptures are reflected in how intersectionality considers “generalizable” explanations of psychological knowledge to be possible distortions of the investigated phenomenon. The notion of psychological norms and measurements is challenged by intersectionality methodologically in favor of modes of inquiry focused on diverse participants’ lived and historical experiences, especially when engaging in quantitative research (Bowleg and Bauer, 2016). Participant involvement as co-creator of research is also undergoing conceptual and methodological shifts right now. According to Overstreet et al. (2020), researchers who conduct research that is informed by intersectionality need to engage their participants in developing their research question and methods, while also taking into account how systems of power may influence the assumptions and practices associated with psychological research. Psychological research and theory must be aligned with a focus on social justice, making social activism an essential outcome of the advancement of psychological knowledge (Settles et al., 2020). In order to situate participants, phenomenon, and knowers in a socio-historical context, an interdisciplinary approach is required. There are a number of fundamental research practices in psychology that are challenged by this method of producing knowledge (Warner et al., 2016).
Damian Jacob Sendler
Because of this, work that uses intersectionality to critically analyze the production of psychological knowledge is undervalued and largely absent from the mainstream of psychological research. Critical intersectionality research in psychology is subject to epistemic exclusion, in which the research itself is marginalized and undervalued as contributing only minimally to the advancement of psychological knowledge. A general lack of interest, or the perception that this work is inaccessible, results in various bias-inducing practices, such as the marginalization of intersectional work in specialized academic journals (Settles et al., 2020). As a result of this publication bias, mainstream psychology has an epistemic bias, which results in the disproportionate propagation of less rigorously conducted, flattened intersectionality research (Bilge, 2013; Warner et al., 2016). As a result of this kind of epistemological exclusion, academics are more likely to overlook critical work and the marginalized scholars who do it, resulting in even more biases in the academic community. For Settles and colleagues (2020), “Our marginalized identities (gender, race, and sexual orientation) are what bring us to the work that we do, including populations we study, questions we ask, and the theoretical lense that we use,” they write. We gain an insider’s perspective on the exclusion of intersectionality in psychology and its consequences for academic careers, including our own, through the challenges we face in academia. Concerns about the growing use of intersectionality in research contexts, as well as the contributions of Black women scholars, are raised by Cole in relation to this exclusion (Cole, 2020). As a minority scholar, you are more likely to be subjected to pressures to “mainstreamify” your research if you are dedicated to conducting critical intersectionality research in the field of psychology.
Damien Sendler: Contrary to popular belief, the use of intersectionality as a model for reshaping neuroscientific knowledge production has only recently been observed by neurofeminists (Bluhm et al., 2012). Intersectional neuroscience should emphasize analytical approaches that “accommodate neural diversity” in light of the idea that people’s biologies are the result of highly contextualized experiences, according to Weng et al. (2020) in their publication “Toward a Compassionate Intersectional Neuroscience: Increasing Diversity and Equity in Contemplative Neuroscience. The authors recommend using multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA), a multivariate method that uses machine learning to derive brain activity patterns predictive of mental states while preserving the brain’s individuality (Weng et al., 2020). As a result of its lack of normalization of brain data and focus on changes in patterns of brain activity, MVPA better accommodates “non-normal” brains, according to its authors (Weng et al., 2020). MVPA, on the other hand, is not “intersectional” in the sense that it avoids the normalization of brain activity by focusing on the similarity of patterns within a single subject. As a result of their work, Weng et al. say, researchers in the field of intersectional neuroscience should focus on finding ways to “partner” with participants rather than simply collecting data “about” them. Projects based on prosocial behavior and empowerment are a natural outcome of community-based participatory research because it reduces power imbalances. One way to shift the focus from the neuroscience of differences to the neuroscience of inclusivity and similarity is by co-creating an intersectional research program with marginalized populations. It is possible to draw meaningful generalizations from brain data without resorting to harmful reductionism, avoiding or minimizing the kind of distorted “generalization” that arises from ignoring intersectionality with these approaches to conducting neuroscience. These suggestions for conducting intersectional neuroscience could be useful for future work in neurofeminism.
Moreover, neurofeminists have proposed epistemological frameworks in which relationships between knowers and the socio-historical context of the phenomenon are essential components of neuroscientific understanding. For Roy (2018), knowledge production has multiple levels, with feminist theory and activism serving as the foundation for a variety of transformative research methods. Even in technoscientific and reductionist environments, Roy envisioned the ability of researchers to produce socio-historically informed scientific knowledge through a process of knowledge reappropriation and meaning attribution. While the NIH mandates that researchers conduct research that is “sex-balanced,” Roy used this method to examine the disparities in reproductive health care for women in light of this policy. As a result of bringing together neuroendocrinologists and reproductive rights activists, this project demonstrated how creating a space for those conversations to take place can generate novel ways for feminists who are interested in neuroscience to engage with the subject matter.
Similar to the epistemological vision of intersectionality research, neurofeminist Gillian Einstein has developed a “situated” approach to neuroscience. “Knowledge” of the nervous system is “situated” in multiple hierarchical and socially constructed interactions involving participant experiences, experimenter positionality, and technological constraints according to Einstein (2012; see also ) (Einstein, 2012). Socioeconomic and biological identities must be intertwined in this “situated” approach to neuroscience (Einstein, 2012). In a recent study of Somali-Canadian women who had their female genitals cut using Einstein’s “very mixed methods” approach, which combined qualitative, quantitative behavioral, and quantitative neurophysiological methodologies (Perovic et al., 2021). The development of the study was greatly aided by the creation of an advisory group from the participants/target community. Perovic et al. (2021) were able to produce novel neuroscientific knowledge about unique pain experiences that intersected with women’s experiences of immigration and cultural acceptance, and in doing so brought to light important considerations for clinical and health advocacy, thus directly contributing to sex discrimination research.
Intersectional approaches to research are emerging as a way to explore alternative models of knowledge production that are based on cross-disciplinary collaboration, avoid undue generalizations, minimize power imbalances between participants and experimenters, and co-create research with hidden populations, as this brief analysis shows. There are a number of approaches that challenge the dominant mode of knowledge production in quantitative fields, such as feminist epistemic alternatives (e.g. Hammonds and Subramaniam, 2003; Richardson, 2013; Roy, 2018; Jordan-Young and Karkazis, 2019), participatory designs (e.g. Buchmüller et al., 2011), and epistemic injustice (e.g. Fricker, 2007; Donnelly, 2018).
Feminist theoretical frameworks for many fields, including neuroscience, are rich in intersectionality. This is especially true in light of recent trends in science reporting on female brains and the brains of people who identify as sex/gender non-conforming (Fine, 2010; Bluhm et al., 2012; Dussauge, 2014; Joel and Vikhanski, 2019; Jordan-Young and Karkazis, 2019; Rippon, 2019; Llaveria Caselles, 2021). Focusing on three themes of intersectional psychology, this analysis identifies specific areas, practices, and critical positions that have the potential to advance feminist practice in neuroscience.
We identify the following main areas of advancement in relation to theme one, which describes intersectionality-informed research on health disparities: In the first place, neurofeminism will benefit from shifting its focus to engage in neuroscientific research that is systems-centered, in which oppressive social structures affecting inequalities in sex/gender-related brain health are modeled and tested. There is less room for reductive, essentialist explanations that risk inadvertently reinforcing oppressive structures when social-structural variables are operationalized and integrated into understanding sex/gender differences in brain health. This approach may also help us connect our understanding of brain health equity with the necessity of social change. Empirically demonstrating the effects of social inequality in neuroscience can be accomplished by including variables such as occupations, law enforcement status, familial structure, racial minority status, and socioeconomic status in research designs as intersecting categories of study rather than merely as demographic variables of description. In order to model and test the effects of social structures on health or other outcomes, variables such as police arrests, incarceration history, access to social security, and neighborhood characteristics can be included. Research designs that explicitly compare privileged and targeted groups before and after the implementation of certain policies, services or appearance/disappearances of organizations (for more insights on research designs centered on social structure see Krieger, 2019) can be a big step forward in understanding socio-structural factors’ impact on health inequality. Socio-structural causal models will become more feasible when large brain datasets with greater socio-structural resolution become available. However, big data analysis should not be regarded as the final approach to capture intersectionality and diversity because sex/gender and race biases have their own risks (Fitsch et al., 2021). Hidden/invisible populations should be studied in depth, as well as the ways in which people’s intersecting social group memberships place them at risk of harm (del Ro-González et al., 2021). Scholars in the field of neurofeminism have already begun some of this research (e.g., Somalian immigrant women in Canada with FGC; Perovic et al., 2021), but more needs to be done to fill the gap.
With this in mind, we identified the following main areas for advancement in relation to theme two, which discussed research aimed at understanding the psychological processing of intersecting groups. To begin, neurofeminist researchers should pay attention to the complex interdependence of intersecting identity categories and how these categories are defined. The current consideration of sex/gender by neurofeminism is explicit, rationalized, and well-grounded in theory and research. According to a neurofeminist perspective, sex/gender is interdependent with other social categories such as race and is often submerged – and even taboo when it comes to face-recognition research (Kuria, 2014; Kaiser Trujillo et al., forthcoming). Neurofeminist research must examine and challenge the operationalization of social categories in order to avoid treating them as homogenous and fixed (Marecek, 2016). Second, the interdependence of social categories in terms of socio-structural structures of privilege and oppression must be taken into account. To better understand how the brain processes sex/gender, researchers may want to conduct studies that play with the power dynamics associated with group membership. It is also possible to open new avenues for socio-historically situated sex/gender neuroscience by adopting an approach like that of Chaney et al. (2020), in which the processing of social group membership is considered alongside who is processing these social cues.
To wrap things up, a third research area looks at how experimenter and participant roles, and how they play a role in knowledge production, might be more fundamentally divided between intersectional and conventional neuroscience perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches in neuroscience research that employ mixed methods, consider principles of inclusivity in morphometric neuroscientific measures over “normalization,” and demand reflection on the socio-historical situatedness of not only participants but also the researchers and research itself are urgently needed to reconcile epistemological differences between these two frameworks. Neurofeminists such as Roy (2018) and Einstein (2012) have made epistemological propositions that align well with an intersectional perspective and can also generate new neurofeminist investigative avenues, but more research using these perspectives remains to be done. Neurofeminist research and the scholars conducting it should be recognized and included in mainstream literatures, and as the field grows, it will be critical to expand methods of raising awareness of this importance. Epistemic oppression and erasure can be prevented in part through efforts like the Neurogenderings Network4, which was started in response to exclusionary epistemological practices. Many new directions for neuroscience can be explored through these avenues for promoting an awareness of scientific knowledge’s location and plurality.
Neurofeminist sex/gender research and practice can benefit from intersectionality. Incorporating approaches from intersectionality can inform the study of these categories and promote research that measures or otherwise accounts for their interdependency rather than falsely orthogonalizing them because it can broaden our understanding of sex/gender into a wider landscape of social categories. Because of its emphasis on social justice, equality, and eradicating racism, neurofeminism shares many of its core principles with intersectionality. As a field within the neurosciences, neurofeminist research that incorporates intersectionality must be careful to avoid biologizing and essentializing intersected identity categories and thus undermining the social justice goals of the endeavor.
