The Politics of Pictured Reality: Locating the Object from Nowhere in fMRI

Abstract

In Sexing the Body, Anne Fausto-Sterling recounts the late twentieth-century taming of the corpus callosum in the name of sexing the brain. This three-dimensional bridge, which transfers signals between lobes of the living brain, was domesticated to make it scientifically tractable: dead, preserved brains were physically sectioned, then conceptually divided into five parts and studiously measured. As she explains, “One is left to assign meaning to an abstraction, and the space opened up for mischief becomes enormous” (2000b: 130).