“Over the last several years, “mirror neurons” have become key players in biological research and popular discourse. They are alleged to endow our brains with a built-in capacity for empathy, mediating sociality and binding us to the suffering of others.”
“According to the critic Victoria Pitts-Taylor, mirror neurons enable the brain to “[generate] a grasp of the other, not with language and thinking but via simulated action and feeling.””
“This sounds grand. But, among other problems, it makes mirroring processes seem, in Pitts-Taylor’s words, “generic, universal, and highly normative rather than ontogenetically specific and multiple.””
“Being in a body, or “embodiment” as it’s called, isn’t just “a common thread that unites us.” In fact, embodiment is affected by the usual suspects: “race, class, gender, and other patterns of social difference.””
“And this means that it’s “enmeshed in suffering” and “violence.””
“In a nutshell, “embodiment is not exactly the same for everyone, and simulation cannot guarantee sociality or empathy.””
“If true understanding is possible across social chasms, it will take much more than mirror neurons, or stories about neurons, to achieve it.”
“The emergence of mirror neurons as subjects of research represents an opportunity to imagine how brains and minds are at once biological and social.”
“As Pitts-Taylor puts it, “perception takes place in worldly contexts that render automatic simulation a poor model for intersubjective understanding.” In other words, a narrow account of the biology of empathy is dangerous when worldly contexts — and “social” backstories — are elided.”
“her new book, The Brain’s Body, Pitts-Taylor, who is a professor of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Wesleyan University”
“The notion of humans-as-“mirrorers” simply fails to account for the consistent reproduction of social injustice and state-sanctioned violence.”
“In response, new materialism reconceptualizes “the terms of social theory, such that the social is seen as a part of, rather than distinct from, the natural, an undertaking that requires a rethinking of the natural too.””
“the inseparability of the “bio” and the “social,” as captured in the word “biosocial.””
“In place of a linguistic process of representing the world, the new materialism proposes “mattering” as the generative process through which matter comes into being.”
“Material stuff — bodies, tools, objects — are understood as imbued with vitality and dynamic force.”
“The new feminist materialism has many sources of inspiration, and not all of its adherents agree on all points (or even, necessarily, adopt the moniker), but one of the most consistent reference points is the work of the philosopher Karen Barad, a theoretical physicist by training who is now a professor of feminist studies, philosophy, and history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.”
“Drawing on insights from quantum theory and science studies, she develops an approach she calls “agential realism.” Criticizing Butler’s failure to “give us any insights into how to take account of the material constraints, the material dimensions of agency, and the material dimensions of regulatory practices,” Barad seeks to transcend the notion of a clear divide between the realms of the material and the discursive.”
“epigenetics is a theory of entanglement: it presents organismic development in terms of dynamics, examining how exposures and experiences modulate the very expression of genes”
“aspects of class and race differences are experienced in specific, embodied ways, which affect how brains develop”
“More generally, the new feminist materialism, in its persistent concern with things that matter, resonates with a larger corpus of work in science studies that attends to what the sociologist of science Bruno Latour has called “matters of concern” — including matters that reveal the tight intertwining of the political and the technoscientific.”
“Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” 157-210 in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna Rapp Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).”
“Karen Barad, “Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 93.”
“Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).”
“Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.”
“Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 2000)”
“Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Bare Bones of Sex: Part 1 – Sex and Gender,” Signs 30, no. 2 (2005)”
“Donna J. Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Socialist Review 15, no. 2 (1985): 65-107.”
“Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).”
“Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225-48.”