Event Details:

Spring 2017 Colloquia Talk: (Imposing?) Sex on the Brain

Feminists interested in neuroscience face a Catch-22 in assessing research on sex differences.  On the one hand, such research is frequently entangled with gender stereotypes and it is often used to support problematic claims about women's and men's relative characteristics and abilities.  On the other, the lack of attention to sex differences in clinical research has meant that women's health needs may go unmet.  In this talk, I argue that one valuable way to approach this dilemma is to start with the more basic question of what it means to say that women's and men's brains are different. In doing so, I will draw on a recent study by the Israeli neuroscientist, Daphna Joel, which has prompted neuroscientists to begin addressing (or, perhaps more accurately, arguing over) exactly this question.  I will show that the different answers on offer for this question have important implications for clinical neuroscience.

Robyn Bluhm is an Associate Professor at Michigan State University with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and Lyman Briggs College. Her research examines philosophical issues in neuroscience and in medicine, with a particular focus on the relationship between ethical and epistemological questions in these areas. She has written extensively on evidence-based medicine and on sex/gender difference research in neuroscience.  She is a co-editor of Neurofeminism: Issues at the Intersection of Feminist Theory and Cognitive Science and of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (IJFAB).