Psychosomatic : feminism and the neurological body

Despite the intensive theorizing of the body within feminist criticism and the humanities over the past two decades, considerations of certain fundamental aspects of the body - its biology and materiality - have been foreclosed.

Most contemporary feminist scholarship has retained the fierce anti-biologism that marked the emergence of second-wave feminism.

Against this trend, Elizabeth A. Wilson argues that scientific theories, and the neurosciences in particular, offer important and innovative contributions to feminist accounts of embodiment.

Wilson contends that a sustained interest in biological detail - the entanglements of biochemistry, affectivity, and the physiology of the internal organs - will enable feminist research to move past its dependency on social constructionism and generate more vibrant, biologically attuned theories of the body.

Demonstrating how to read neuroscientific materials without recourse to conventional socio-biological presumptions, Wilson analyzes popular scientific works in relation to psychopharmacology, neugastroenterology, evolutionary theory, hypothalamic structures, reptilian temperament, and affective neuroscience. Rather than examining the conventionalizing tendencies within neurological data, she focuses on its openness to rethinking and transformation.

Whether considering how subcortical functions are modified by Simon LeVay's hypothesis about the brains of gay men or how Peter Kramer's neurological explanation of depression in "Listening to Prozac" points to a sympathetic understanding of a biological malady, Wilson contends that the central and peripheral nervous systems are powerfully allied with sexuality, the affects, emotional states, cognitive appetites, and symptomologies. "Psychosomatic" is a compelling argument that theories of the body rooted in the humanities would be enlivened rather than limited by engagement with the sciences.