Lessons from Neurofeminism and Revisiting RLY!

What a productive day! I realized that I love Elizabeth Wilson (or … her books) and that the owl is really a Bryn Mawr thing (and Wikipedia tells us, why), see:

rly!Only a few uncontextualized and partly very preliminary hypotheses—some of which I’m not sure if I actually believe in them (except for the last one, pretty sure about that):

  • Brain organization theory inhibited a conceptualization of cerebral plasticity as an explanatory model for sex/gender differences and degraded it to yet another manifestation of a hormone-induced (or hormone-mediated, if we assume an immaterial male-female-dualism as the primary cause) dimorphism.
  • Basic neuroscientists’ work (plasticity research) seemed rather unsexy to applied researchers (sex/gender difference neuroscientists), because they were occupied rebuilding their neuroscience boat on the ocean, and didn’t want to take it to the harbor to rebuild it on a new theoretical foundation (I got this one from my project advisor Jonathan Moreno, and you should check out his latest queer-political and nerdy-intelligent pieces).
  • Sex/gender difference brain researchers adhered to the brain organization theory instead of embracing the growing knowledge about plasticity in the 1970s and 1980s because they had their hands—or heads—full defending themselves against second-wave feminists.
  • I’m not a feminist. But maybe acting feminist for a while is the only way how we can build a society that will allow us to once indulge in being humanists.

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Tabea Cornel (July 18, 2014). Lessons from Neurofeminism and Revisiting RLY! The Semipermeable Membrane. Retrieved June 24, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/ppj3


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