Your brain
Studies of the effects of class on the brain tend to invoke culture and environment as the predominant cause for distinctions. For example, a recent study of the respective effects of wealth and poverty on children’s brains found that “normal nine and 10-year-olds from rich and poor backgrounds had differing electrical activity in a part of the brain linked to problem solving.” Professor Robert Knight, one of the researchers, offered the following interpretation of the results:
“This is a wake-up call - it’s not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status.”
The cause of the difference between rich and poor brains is not, therefore, innate, but cultured. Which may seem obvious enough today, but comparable positions have not always been so intuitive. In the early twentieth century - which is to say, for certain social darwinist ideologies - this same result would have been interpreted as proving that the rich are rich and the poor are poor because of their brains. It is indeed a relatively recent idea that broad socio-economic conditions can radically effect the body in the most fundamental way.
However, not every categorical distinction discovered in brain studies is related to social-cultural conditions. Not every newly discovered brain fact is interpreted with culture in mind. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, the brain difference in question is seen as reflecting an innate, categorical disposition. In these instances, that is, images of the brain are not characterized as the contingent outcome of a complex process of development, experience, and culture, but rather as manifestations of a deeper, often genetically-mandated ‘nature’.
For example, a recent study, published in Behavioral Neuroscience, that found that ‘gay men read maps like straight women’ interpreted the results in a way diametrically opposed to the methodology of the ‘classed brain’ study. The differences discovered were not interpreted as the image of a developmental-cultural process that produces those identity-oriented affinities and differences, but were interpreted as reflecting innate conditions that produce those identities.
Obvious cultural factors were carelessly eliminated. Without even considering what role map design plays in their relative legibility, Qazi Rahman, a psychobiologist who led the study at the University of East London, concluded that, “The stereotype that women are relatively poor map readers is borne out by a reasonable bulk of scientific literature.” The map itself, and the conventions that constitute its design, were thus taken completely for granted, even though, as the study seems to suggest, the reading of it is decidedly not gender neutral.
Not only does Rahman’s study mistake the work of culture for laws of biology, it also orders the various identities in question into a determinate hierarchy - a hierarchy that now appears biologically mandated, but which is in fact culturally enforced (by authoritative acts like Rahman’s). This hierarchizing move is made apparent even in the title. Gay men read maps like straight women, and never the other way around. Homosexuality is regarded throughout as a second order sexuality, a combination or simulation of ‘base’ heterosexual features. “Gay men adopt male and female strategies,” Rahman remarks. “Therefore their brains are a sexual mosaic.” That is, “gay men may take on aspects of female psychology, and lesbians acquire aspects of male psychology.” So, even though these features are just as much a part of gay men’s mental frameworks as they are of women’s, it is the former that borrows from the latter (and the same goes for the lesbian “acquiring” properly male mental aspects). In each case, an imaginary temporality is introduced to establish which identity is the foundation or base and which is the auxiliary ‘combination’.
It’s not hard to see how studies like these work to reinforce the very cultural conditions that produce the results they falsely interpret. The titles of the London Times article on the study - “Gay men ‘as bad as women with maps’” - and the London Telegraph’s - “Women and gay men are ‘worst drivers’” - indeed show just how available these studies are to attempts to reinforce the crudest of stereotypes.
But beyond even the rhetoric that loans these studies an extra air of scientific legitimacy, there is plenty of work on how urban design itself, in its details and in its most general conception, is gendered. (A lap around the Gender and the Built Environment database will give you an idea of just how pervasive design bias really is.) But these kinds of questions are completely lost on Rahman’s map reading study, which presumes not only that maps are un-biased, ahistorical, clearly legible documents, but that the world that’s actually mapped is just as neutral and objective.
