Feminist Theory After Sex and Gender (FEMSAG) is a research action that aims to develop philosophical tools to clarify and refine the foundational concepts of “nature” and “nurture”, such as they bear on current understandings of gender and sexuality both in the narrow domain of academic gender studies as well as in the wider public domain. The nature vs. nurture issue regarding gender and sexuality relate attempts to identify the causal bases of sex differences in cognition, emotion, behaviour and interests, as well as in positioning in social, cultural, economic and political life. Typically, “nature” is associated with putatively biological factors, such as selective pressures during evolutionary histories, genetic and hormonal factors in development and behaviour, and brain structure and function. Conversely, “nurture” typically subsumes all factors acting in a given organism’s physical and social environments to incline its bodily, mental and behavioural development in a certain direction. This supposition of two sets of causal factors conjointly giving rise to extant sex differences among human subjects continues to inflect contemporary gender theory and politics, even as they also often find themselves contesting it.
FEMSAG engages with cutting-edge developments in feminist and gender studies concerning (the interrelations of) the concepts and interrelation of “nature”/”sex” and “nurture”/ “gender”, with a view to enhance the conceptual framework in terms of which new policies and reforms concerning gender- and sexuality-related issues have to be projected. Such issues may include male (sexual) aggression against women, female underrepresentation in key societal and professional domains, and current controversies over how best to promote sexual and gender health and justice for trans people and otherwise gender non-conforming populations.
The conclusions of the action are as follows:
1) What has been labeled "neurosexism" by leading scholars within the field of feminist criticism of neuroscientific research on sex, gender, brains and behaviour is a form of neurocentrism – the notion that human behaviour can be explained (predominantly) by features of the brain, which can be addressed using the tools of the embodied-enactive approach to cognitive/affective neuroscience (paper in WP1).
2) The embodied-enactive approaches to cognition and emotion might nevertheless be limited as a framework through which to account for such a phenomenon as gender identity, which seems to require some kind of neural representation in order to be fully explained (paper in WP3).
3) The so-called nature vs. culture problematic (with which the nature vs. nurture issue is often associated and also equated) needs to be dissolved into the lesser issues of humanity vs. animality, gene vs. environment (aka nature vs. nurture) and discourse vs. reality (paper in WP2).
4) Karen Barad's bid for a "thoroughgoing critical naturalism", elaborated on the basis of of Niels Bohr's complementarity principle, does not accommodate the nature vs. nurture challenge to feminist theory that mainline strands of naturalism have always represented for it (paper in WP2).
