Conclusion: Making Gender Matter in an Age of Neurochemical Selves

Abstract

We start with the question: Does gender still matter in an age of neurochemical thinking about self and other? We argue that gender does still matter because one of the most significant effects of understanding ourselves as ‘neurochemical selves’ has been a shift in the site of the deviance of ‘others’ from bodies to brains. The gendered body has long been the central site for the organization and performance of the social tasks of restraint, reproduction, regulation, and representation (Ettorre, 2007: 23 and 34; quoting Turner, 1996: 67). When the embodied routines through which these tasks are accomplished become disrupted or destabilized by social-structural shifts, institutional crisis, or changing social norms, the bodies who perform them are seen as maladapted and marked as ‘deviant’ (Ettorre, 2007: 33). Indeed the bodies of drug-using women have ‘embodied deviance’ for decades of public policy in both the US and the UK. However, a shift to understanding ‘the brain’ as the central site of ‘embodied deviance’ is now underway.